Cymbeline Refinished

The practice of improving Shakespear's plays, more especially in
the matter of supplying them with what are called happy endings, is
an old established one which has always been accepted without
protest by British audiences. When Mr Harley Granville-Barker,
following up some desperate experiments by the late William Poel,
introduced the startling innovation of performing the plays in the
West End of London exactly as Shakespear wrote them, there was
indeed some demur; but it was expressed outside the theatre and led
to no rioting. And it set on foot a new theory of Shakespearean
representation. Up to that time it had been assumed as a matter of
course that everyone behind the scenes in a theatre must know much
better than Shakespear how plays should be written, exactly as it
is believed in the Hollywood studios today that everyone in a film
studio knows better than any professional playwright how a play
should be filmed. But the pleasure given by Mr Granville-Barker's
productions shook that conviction in the theatre; and the
superstition that Shakespear's plays as written by him are
impossible on the stage, which had produced a happy ending to King
Lear, Gibber's Richard III, a love scene in the tomb of the
Capulets between Romeo and Juliet before the poison takes effect,
and had culminated in the crude literary butcheries successfully
imposed on the public and the critics as Shakespear's plays by
Henry Irving and Augustin Daly at the end of the last century, is
for the moment heavily discredited. It may be asked then why I,
who always fought fiercely against that superstition in the days
when I was a journalist-critic, should perpetrate a spurious fifth
act to Cymbeline, and do it too, not wholly as a literary jeu
d'esprit, but in response to an actual emergency in the theatre
when it was proposed to revive Cymbeline at no less sacred a place
than the Shakespear Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Cymbeline, though one of the finest of Shakespear's later plays now
on the stage, goes to pieces in the last act. In fact I mooted the
point myself by thoughtlessly saying that the revival would be all
right if I wrote a last act for it. To my surprise this blasphemy
was received with acclamation; and as the applause, like the
proposal, was not wholly jocular, the fancy began to haunt me, and
persisted until I exorcised it by writing the pages which ensue.

I had a second surprise when I began by reading the authentic last
act carefully through. I had not done so for many years, and had
the common impression about it that it was a cobbled-up affair by
several hands, including a vision in prison accompanied by scraps
of quite ridiculous doggerel.

For this estimate I found absolutely no justification nor excuse.
I must have got it from the last revival of the play at the old
Lyceum theatre, when Irving, as Iachimo, a statue of romantic
melancholy, stood dumb on the stage for hours (as it seemed) whilst
the others toiled through a series of dénouements of crushing
tedium, in which the characters lost all their vitality and
individuality, and had nothing to do but identify themselves by
moles on their necks, or explain why they were not dead. The
vision and the verses were cut out as a matter of course; and I
ignorantly thanked Heaven for it.

When I read the act as aforesaid I found that my notion that it is
a cobbled-up pasticcio by other hands was an unpardonable
stupidity. The act is genuine Shakespear to the last full stop,
and late phase Shakespear in point of verbal workmanship.

The doggerel is not doggerel: it is a versified masque, in
Shakespear's careless woodnotes wild, complete with Jupiter as deus
ex machina, eagle and all, introduced, like the Ceres scene in The
Tempest, to please King Jamie, or else because an irresistible
fashion had set in, just as at all the great continental opera
houses a ballet used to be de rigueur. Gounod had to introduce one
into his Faust, and Wagner into his Tannhäuser, before they could
be staged at the Grand Opera in Paris. So, I take it, had
Shakespear to stick a masque into Cymbeline. Performed as such,
with suitable music and enough pictorial splendor, it is not only
entertaining on the stage, but, with the very Shakespearean feature
of a comic jailor which precedes it, just the thing to save the
last act.