Page:On Shakespeare, or, What You Will, Furness, 1908.djvu/20

18 quite the most delightful character in the play to me,—is the prototype of the Fool in Lear. He too, measurably enacts a Greek Chorus:—he sees through the shallowness of Olivia’s mourning for her brother, he detects Maria’s love for Sir Toby, and he tells the fickle Duke Orsino that he is like changeable taffeta.

Let me here make a digression, for a moment, to another land, and another dramatic literature. The French, as you know, adopted in their drama the three unities of Time, Place, and Action, but failed to adopt the Chorus. Now it is the Chorus alone which makes the unities of time and place necessary. The Chorus is composed of men or women, and inasmuch as they have to watch the whole play and even take part in it, their presence is limited by their power of endurance. Human nature cannot, while watching any proceeding, hold out, at the extremest limit, longer than from sunrise to sunset. Hence, for the Chorus’s sake, there must be unity of time. For the same reason there must be unity of place; these same old men or maidens composing the Chorus cannot in the twinkling of an eye go from Thebes to Argos. The omission of the Chorus, while retaining the unities of time and place, was, therefore, in the French drama, an oversight into which it fell from following Seneca, whose Choruses were not those of the Greek tragedians, yet the need was felt of a Chorus that could criticise or applaud the action. Hence arose the well-known claque. This assertion, let me hasten to add, is pure surmise on my part. There may be abundant literature on the subject, but I have failed to find it, and I may be quite wrong. I can plead in support of it only my own humble experience when, over half a century ago, I saw Rachel in Phèdre and attended performances at the Théâtre Français, and then, for the first time, heard the claque. I cannot forget the emotion of grateful enlightenment which was evoked by having the finest passages thus distinguished and emphasized for me. I was not at first aware that the applause came from professional claqueurs, and was struck with admiration at the quick and sympathetic response of a French audience, and no longer wondered at their reputation for critical insight. Among the earlier editors of Shakespeare, Pope and Warburton were wont to mark, by inverted commas, all the finest passages in the plays. Was not this practice virtually the same as the French claque? And when, nowadays, on the printed page