of Imogen, noble, royal youths, full of valour, aspiration, courtesy, barely hiding regal birth under the rough guise of "mountaineers," played by two blue-muzzled, obese adults, who did not in any way illustrate the lines 'Tis wonder That an invisible instinct should frame them To royalty unlearn'd, honour untaught. It is with a sense of injury and wrong that imagination, face to face with such a rendering, tries to piece forth for its private joy the wild, free grace of the obscured young royalties; and in its effort owes the stage naught but obstruction, insult, outrage. But it would. form too sad a chapter were I to enumerate the heavy, base wrongs to the ideal of which the stage has so often been guilty in its unworthy presentments of Shakspeare's youthful heroes. They are serene, cheerful, hopeful, healthy-of course we must except unhappy Romeo, victim of circumstances hanging in the stars-they do not war upon "mud gods" or "sham captains;" they do not seek desolate places, to wrestle there with demons. To them, in their spacious times, Burleigh and Walsingham were not mud gods; Drake and Raleigh were not sham captains; and they did not contemplate Sidney as addicted to wandering, in search of demons, in the waste, desolate places of the earth. No, they seek to enjoy life; with eyes that melted in love or that kindled in war they feel the thronging of soft and delicate desires; they love love; they worship courage and they ensue happiness. I never quite feel that Carlyle's grim moral earnestness was in entire sympathy with Shakspeare's song. The types of beauty, valour, charm shown through Shakspeare's young hero-lover cavaliers had but small attraction for the sage of emphasis and of struggle. Shakspeare's jeunes premiers accepted very complacently the fair conditions of life that existed in the working, noble times of great Elizabeth, and those conditions afforded scope for highhearted hope, for knightly ambition, for romantic daring, and for noble love. The times were great. It is more common to meet with a good Jaques than with a good Orlando. In the glamour of his youthful beauty, in his strength, in his generosity, and in his tenderness Orlando is worthy of his Rosalind. An actor should never forget this point. The jeune premier of our flabby day is played more satisfactorily than is the young hero of the poetical drama. An actor who appears as first young man in a piece of the hour does not need to be so fine a fellow as the actor should be who undertakes to personate Bassanio or Orlando. All those divine creatures, those heroines of Shakspeare, were acted in his day, and for some time afterwards, by youths and young men. May we not fancy that this hard condition was a sorrow to Shakspeare, who, of all men, must most keenly have felt how much better his godlike women could have been realised by actresses? It must have been hard for boys to turn their masculine natures to favour and to prettiness when they had to enact women— and such women! Shakspeare must have longed to see the boards trodden by the light foot of woman, with her incomparable grace and witchery and feeling. What manner of youth could be found, even in Elizabeth's time, worthily to personate the divinity of womanhood? We know next to nothing of these boy-women actors; but a demand creates a supply, and they may have been more satisfactory than we can well imagine. They must have been handsomedelicately handsome. The fact that boys acted his heroines may have impelled Shakspeare to present his Rosalind, Imogen, Julia, Viola in doublet and hose, because in male attire the boys must have looked and acted their best. It is more easy to conceive a male representative of Lady Macbeth than of Juliet; but we, with our advantages, can never be wholly reconciled to the idea of a woman played by a man. The greatest revolution in the history of the modern drama was the introduction of women upon the stage. This change was caused not merely by art considerations, but arose, in part, from the laxity of morals and of manners at the Restoration; but, nevertheless, what a mighty and beneficent change it was! What gifts and grace, what loveliness, purity, tenderness, genius, charm, have been shown to the delighted world since women have been played by women within the confines of the magic wooden O! How did, how could the players of Shakspeare's time procure boys of such intelligence, beauty, delicacy of mind that they could worthily personate pure, lovely, noble women? Could we now tolerate any youth in such parts as Imogen, Desdemona, Juliet ? Still it must be remembered that the boys who first acted such characters were probably trained, inspired, instructed by the master himself; and he may well have done wonders. It was a hard condition, and twin-born with Shakspeare's dramatic greatness, that he should see his women played by lads. Could he ever have been wholly satisfied with the result? Could he ever have dreamed of a time in which the actress should arise in her glory and rule the charmed stage? The stage records of the Restoration are, happily, pretty full. On February 12, 1660-61, Pepys went to the theatre, and "there saw 'The Scornefull Lady'" (of Beaumont and Fletcher), "now done by a woman (Mrs. Marshall), which makes the play much better than ever it did (seem) to me." Not only to the Secretary of the Admiralty, but to the whole house must the play have gone much better with an actress in the leading part. On August 18, 1660, Pepys saw "The Loyall Subject" (Beaumont and Fletcher again), "where one Kynaston, a boy, acted the Duke's sister, Olympia, but made the loveliest lady that ever I saw in my life." Demand had evidently produced supply. Pepys first saw women on the stage on January 3, 1660-61; but they still had a formidable rival in Kynaston. "Kynaston, the boy, had the good turn to appear in three shapes-first, as a poor woman in ordinary clothes, to please Morose; then in fine clothes, as a gallant, and in them was clearly the prettiest woman in the whole house; and then likewise did appear the handsomest man in the house." The play was "The Silent Woman" of Ben Jonson. It may be that the Globe and the Blackfriars Theatres were the fortunate possessors of several Kynastons; but the names of these fortunate youths, with one exception, have not come down to us. It is mainly a question of insufficient record; and we know, unhappily, comparatively so little of the stage of Shakspeare. One male player of women parts is mentioned by Ben Jonson in his "The Devil is an Ass." Engine, speaking of such actors, says— But there be some of them Are very honest lads; there's Dickey Robinson, A very pretty fellow. Dickey is invited to a feast, and the fact that he acted female parts is shown by his going, Drest like a lawyer's wife, amongst them all; But to see him behave it, And lay the law, and carve and drink unto them, Meercraft: They say he's an ingenious youth. It were to be wished that we knew more of ingenious Dickey Robinson, who may have been a fair type of his congeners. This poor player is fortunate in having his name rescued from oblivion by rare Ben Jonson. It cannot be doubted that Goethe, when director of the Weimar Theatre, would lay stress upon having suitable "juvenile leads," and would be as careful to have a good Max as he would be to have a good Wallenstein. We can no longer play Shakspeare. Our actors are out of touch with our great poet; and our audiences are flabby and are trivial, depraved by that unemotional, unideal, flat realism which is the tone of pieces which are very often inferior to the excellent realistic character acting bestowed upon them. What sense have such audiences of the noble natures, enshrined in fine manners, of Shakspeare's young heroes? Bar Cleopatra, who is an imperial wanton, Shakspeare, when he wishes to depict an ordinary woman with a present combining a "past," draws frankly Doll Tearsheet, and pretermits superfluous analysis. We see now a mistaken attempt to play the poetical drama "naturally," as it is called; and this attempt results in commonplace-or worse. Poetry, when ignorantly reduced, or forcibly dragged down to the level of prose, sinks to something lower and worse than pure prose. Juliet's wishes and desires, prosaically and "naturally" expressed, seem, to our surprise, to be immodest. They would not strike us in that light if spoken with the glow of fine rapture, born of intense, genuine, and not ignoble passion, in which the poet has conceived and written the tender and poetic passage. Our objection to the leading juveniles of the hour applies, of course, most strongly to such characters in Shakspeare's plays; but our revolt would be directed against the rendering of almost all such parts in the ideal drama. The walking gentlemen, and characters of the sort, but of higher mark, in plays of the day, are often well rendered; but the stage, conscious of its own shortcomings, is seeking a divorce from the ideal, the poetical drama; and one great symptom of its vice is to be sought-and found-in the insufficiency of its LEADING JUVENILES. H. SCHÜTZ WILSON. 77 STERNHOLD AND HOPKINS AND IT THEIR FOLLOWERS. T is a curious circumstance that both in France and in England the necessity—or, let us say, the expediency of making the Psalmist "run in rhyme" was first recognised by men connected with the Court. It occasioned no little surprise when Clement Marot, "valet of the bedchamber" to Francis I., put forward his metrical psalms as substitutes for the love-songs of the French grandees. And yet, the surprise notwithstanding, these "sanctes chansonettes" of Marot leaped into fashion, and a first edition of ten thousand was disposed of before the poet had well realised that he had become famous. There were no psalm tunes in those days, and so the princes, the king's mistresses, the lords and ladies of the Court adapted whatever lay ready to hand, and unhesitatingly wedded the "sweet singer of Israel" to the ballad tunes of the times. More than that, the fashionables had each a favourite psalm of his or her own. Thus the Dauphin, as became a lover of the chase, selected "As the hart panteth after the water brooks"; while the Queen, with equal appropriateness, chose "Rebuke me not in thine indignation." Diana of Poictiers would one day be heard singing, "From the depths of my heart"; the next day King Antony of Navarre would be chanting, "Stand up, O Lord, to revenge my quarrel" ! A strange picture this, of a dissolute Court singing the Psalms of David, from exquisite little duodecimos in morocco gilt, to the jig tunes of the day. A strange but not a unique picture, for even the staid Scottish Presbyterians of early Reformation times had done something of the same kind, and had anticipated the Salvation Army of to-day by transforming the tunes of "John Anderson, my Jo" and other "godless aires" to suit the psalms with which their thoughtful leaders had provided them. The "Psalms of Dundee," produced while Knox was preparing to thunder out his anathemas against the priests, were incongruous enough in all conscience in |