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The Modesty of Nature: Charles Fechter's Hamlet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
W. B. Donne, writing to Mrs. Fanny Kemble in America, called it “the most remarkable event in current history, setting aside Garibaldi and The Civil War on your side of the water.…” Speaking of the same event, Charles Dickens was later to declare: “Perhaps no innovation in Art was ever accepted with so much favor by so many intellectual persons precommitted to, and preoccupied by, another system.…”
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1974
References
Notes
1 Johnson, Catherine B., ed., William Bodham Donne and His Friends (London, 1905), p. 252Google Scholar.
2 Dickens, Charles, “Fechter's Acting,” Atlantic Monthly (08 1869), p. 244Google Scholar.
3 Scott, Clement, The Drama of Yesterday and Today (London, 1899), I, 461. Fechter created the role of Armand Duval ín La Dame aux CaméliasGoogle Scholar.
4 Shattuck, Charles, The Hamlet of Edwin Booth (Urbana, Ill., 1969), p. 44Google Scholar.
5 Allen, Shirley S., Samuel Phelps and Sadler's Wells Theatre (Middletown, Conn., 1971), p. 192Google Scholar.
6 In his treatment of Hamlet in Shakespeare and the Actors (Cambridge, Mass., 1948)Google Scholar, A. C. Sprague mentions Fechter's performance a number of times but Sprague is concerned solely with innovations in stage business. He does not deal at all with the larger questions of Fechter's style and conception or with contemporary response to the performance.
7 Field, Kate, Charles Albert Fechter (Boston, 1882), p. 49Google Scholar.
8 Ibid., p. 50. Fechter mounted three major productions of Hamlet: At the Princess's on 20 March 1861; at the Lyceum on 21 May 1864; and, in America, at Niblo's Garden on 14 February 1870. My study of accounts of the three performances convinces me that there were few significant differences among them as regards acting and production styles; (a possible difference in interpretaion between the English and American productions is discussed herein). The picture of Fechter's Hamlet offered here is therefore a composite one, though in most instances the particular performance referred to will be clear from the date of the material quoted.
9 Anderson, James, An Actor's Life (n. p., 1902), p. 258Google Scholar.
10 Punch, 20 April 1861, p. 165.
11 Macready does not appear to have seen Fechter. Urged by Mrs. Pollock to do so, he declared that he “should go with a predisposition towards a favorable, indeed, a high, opinion of M. Fechter, from a criticism I read upon his performance of the ‘Corsican Brothers,’” and went on to conclude that “he is the only actor living that I would now think it worth my while to go and see.”—SirPollock, Frederick, Macready's Reminiscences and Selections from his Diaries and Letters (New York, 1875), pp. 689–690Google Scholar. Filon, Pierre (The English Stage, trans. Whyte, Frederic [New York, 1897], p. 158) has Macready attending a performance of Fechter's Hamlet but the anecdote is surely apocryphal: “On the evening of his last performance…. Macready, taking from him [Fechter] Hamlet's velvet coat, addressed to him, in tones of some emotion, Horatio's words—‘Adieu, dear Prince!’ and added, ‘It seems to me that I understand now for the first time all that there is of tenderness, humanity, and poetry in the character’.”Google Scholar
12 Morning Chronicle 23 March 1861; Illustrated London News, 23 March 1861; Era, 24 March 1861.
13 Osborne, Charles C., ed., The Letters and Speeches of Charles Dickens (New York, n.d.), p. 99Google Scholar.
14 Qtd. in Hutton, Laurence and Matthews, Brander, Macready, Forrest and their Contemporaries (New York, 1886), p. 231Google Scholar.
15 “Fechter as Hamlet,” Atlantic Monthly (November 1870), p. 570.
16 Woods, George B., “The New Tragedian,” Old and New (April 1870), p. 517Google Scholar; White, R. G., “The New Hamlet,” The Nation, 24 February 1870, p. 119Google Scholar.
17 Lews, George Henry, On Actors and the Art of Acting (New York, 1957), p. 116Google Scholar.
18 Loc. cit.
19 Reminiscences of a Dramatic Critic (New York, 1902), pp. 118–119Google Scholar.
20 Loc. cit.
21 Journal of a London Playgoer (London, 1866), p. 220Google Scholar.
22 Loc. cit.
23 Haight, Gordon S., ed., The George Eliot Letters (New Haven, Conn., 1954), III, 442Google Scholar.
24 OED, s.v.
25 Loc. cit. In Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, translated by Thomas Carlyle in 1824, Goethe had caused his eponymous hero to describe Hamlet as a “soft …royal flower,” possessed of “tender soul,” and to sum up the action of the play as follows: “Shakespeare meant … to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it. In this view the whole piece seems to me to be composed. There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom; the roots expand, the jar is shivered.” (New York, 1962, pp. 211, 236.)
26 6 April 1861, p. 342.
27 Lewes, p. 121.
28 22 March 1861.
29 16 February 1870.
30 P. 516.
31 New York, 20 February 1870.
32 Field, pp. 93, 89.
33 Clapp, pp. 120, 116.
34 Booth opened 5 January 1870; Fechter made his first American appearance 10 January in Ruy Blas.
35 Shattuck, pp. 23–4.
36 Making a similar point, Harold Child observed some years ago: “It is tempting to believe that, if London could have seen Booth's Hamlet before it saw … Fechter's …, the innovations of the ‘naturalistic’ player might have been regarded more steadily.” (“The Stage History of Hamlet,” Hamlet, ed. Wilson, J. Dover, [London, 1934], p. xci)Google Scholar.
37 Clapp, p. 127.
38 “Players and Painted Stage: Nineteenth Century Acting,” PMLA, LXI (1946), 544Google Scholar.
39 Green Room Recollections (Bristol, 1896?), p. 23Google Scholar.
40 Downer, Alan S., “Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth-Century Acting,” PMLA, LVIII (1943), 1002–1037CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Wasserman, Earl R., “The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century Theories of Acting,” JEGP, XLVI (1947), 271Google Scholar.
42 Political and Literary Journal, 18 October 1849; quoted by Downer, 545.
43 4 May 1861.
44 Though natural, or “French” acting had been seen in England with increasing regularity during the past decade and more, its use was confined almost exclusively to non-Shakespearean drama; for a full account of the development of the natural style in England, see Downer, “Painted Stage,” 548 ff.
45 Some of the American papers insisted that it was “an auburn, not a flaxen wig” (New York World, 15 February 1870), but whether this represents a change from the London performances I cannot say. In any case, the “fair” wig does not appear to have been original with Fechter, though it was all but universally thought to be so at the time. William Winter says the device had been used by E. L. Davenport, in America, “many years before” Fechter, and by Robinson, Frederick C. P., “in the provincial theatres of Great Britain” (Shakespeare on the Stage [New York, 1916], p. 354)Google Scholar.
46 The Galaxy Miscellany (April 1870), p. 557. The reference is undoubtedly to Dürer's self-portrait of 1500, called “one of the most celebrated self-portraits in the world.” (Steck, Max, Dürer and His World, [New York, 1957], p. 65.)Google Scholar
47 Shakespeare on the Stage (New York, 1916), p. 404. There may be something to Winter's allegation. In the Dürer portrait, according to Steck, the artist “adopted the austere symmetry of Christ's image as Redeemer of the World” (p. 64). Furthermore, before reading either Winter or the Galaxy reference to Dürer, my own reaction to the photograph of Fechter as Hamlet, reproduced in Field's biography, was that it strikingly resembled a “head of Christ” by an old masterGoogle Scholar.
48 Morning Chronicle, 23 March 1861.
49 Lloyd's, 29 May 1864.
50 The costume was described as “Medieval Danish” by the Times (23 May 1864) and as “early Teutonic” by the Morning Herald (22 March 1861). Though fully a third of the reviewers hailed this style as an innovation, it is difficult to understand why. The “archeologically correct” knee-length tunic had been introduced by Charles Kean in 1838 and had been worn by him, as well as by Macready and Phelps throughout the 1840s and 50s. These earlier Hamlets, however, had included in their dress certain romantic embellishments (lace collars and cuffs, sleeve puffs, the Order of the Elephant, etc.), all of which Fechter eliminated; the resulting gain in simplicity may account for the strong impression of newness his appearance produced. For a full account of these and other changes in the dress of Hamlet, see Mander, Raymond and Mitchenson, Joe, Hamlet Through the Ages (London, 1952)Google Scholar; Russell, D. A., “Hamlet Costumes from Garrick to Gielgud,” SS 9 (1956), 54–55Google Scholar; Mander, Raymond and Mitchenson, Joe, “Hamlet Costumes: A Correction,” SS 11 (1958), 123–124Google Scholar; and, Pentzell, Raymond J., “Kemble's Hamlet Costume,” TS, XIII (May 1972), 81–85Google Scholar.
51 Clapp, p. 116.
52 Morning Chronicle, 23 March 1861.
53 Lewes, p. 120.
54 20 April 1861.
55 London Times, 22 March 1861.
56 Promptbook for the Lyceum production, London, 21 May 1864. Copy in the Folger Library. Hereafter referred to as Promptbook.
57 23 March 1861.
58 31 March 1861.
59 Athenaeum, 23 March 1861.
60 22 March 1861.
61 Lloyd's, 29 May 1864.
62 New York Times, 16 February 1870.
63 15 June 1864.
64 Copy in the Folger Library.
65 New York Times, 16 February 1870.
66 Curiosities of the American Stage (New York, 1891), p. 310Google Scholar.
67 Examiner, 20 April 1861.
68 23 May 1864.
69 Orchestra, 28 May 1864.
70 SirMartin, Theodore, Essays on the Drama (London, 1874), p. 99Google Scholar.
71 “Herman Vezin on Charles Fechter,” in Field, p. 152.
72 Illustrated London News, 23 March 1861.
73 For further details of Fechter's alterations, see “A New Stage Stride,” All The Year Round, X (31 October 1863), 229–234Google Scholar.
74 29 May 1864.
75 23 May 1864.
76 Ibid.
77 Loc. cit.
78 28 May 1864.
79 15 June 1864.
80 23 May 1864.
81 Ibid.
82 Letters, Osborne, ed., p. 99.
83 Scott, I, 459.
84 Promptbook.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
87 Qtd. in Shattuck, p. 258.
88 Martin, p. 101.
89 Qtd. in Shattuck, pp. 97–8.
90 24 February 1870.
91 Lewes, p. 120.
92 23 May 1864.
93 Generalizations about Fechter's influence on later Shakespearean production are easier to articulate than they are to document; neither Shattuck nor Allen, quoted earlier on this topic (Fn. 4 and 5), offer to substantiate their claims.—What can be documented is this: Fechter's particular brand of naturalism was a conspicuous feature of Irving's portrayal of Hamlet a decade later (Lyceum, 31 October 1874). This is seen in the truly striking similarity of critical comment on the two performances. Consider the following: “[Mr. Irving's] inclination to lounge—we had almost written ‘sprawl’—and sit about at every chance was too apparent” (Bell's Weekly Messenger, 7 November 1874); “habitually takes persons of high and low degree by the hand, leans on their shoulders or clasps them around the neck”; “Mr. Irving will lean over sides of and backs of chairs, or even nurse one leg in an attitude not altogether graceful”; “his greeting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has a sort of bourgeois cordiality about it” (Daily News, 2 November 1874); “[he] irresistibly reminds us of the effeminate loungers whom we are prone to encounter in the drawing-rooms of London” (Sporting Times, 7 November 1874); “wonderfully natural … but not natural to the play” (ibid.); “he reduces himself to the level of daily life …[and shows]a certain colloquial familiarity of which we cannot approve” (Figaro, 7 November 1874). One reviewer actually named Fechter as the progenitor of Irving's casual deportment: “The practice of delivering the opening sentences, and in some cases the entire context, of philosophic soliloquies and passionate speeches in a sitting posture was, we believe, first introduced by Mr. Fechter, but it is neither graceful nor natural. Quick-thronging thought and tempestuous emotions set the body in correspondent action and are inconsistent with an attitude of repose” (Morning Post, 2 November 1874).—It is clear from these remarks that the metamorphosis of Hamlet from a “creature of the imagination” to a “living human being” occasioned almost as much critical distress when attempted by Irving as it had when first seen in the person of Fechter. Nevertheless, if Fechter did transmit something to a later generation of Shakespearean actors, it was probably through Irving, whose enormous prestige, begun in 1874 and continuously strengthened over the next quarter-century, enabled him eventually to put the stamp of orthodoxy on the revolutionary methods of his daring predecessor.
94 Scott, I, 285.
95 Letters, Osborne, ed., p. 99.
96 “Recollections of Charles Fechter,” in Field, p. 158.