Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/203

Rh ever will be equal to Shakespeare unless the technic of the art should advance far beyond anything now foreseeable; certainly up to now every attempt to put him upon the screen has been a failure. Shakespeare's sorcery dwells chiefly in the magic of his words and their proper reading, both utterly lost upon the screen. Tree was like a drowning man clutching at a straw and no straw there. Reduced to pantomime, interspersed with occasional emasculated quotations as captions, the latter read haltingly and without feeling or emphasis, and with little understanding, by the spectators, "Macbeth" became a sticky tea-party salad set before a hungry harvest hand.

The camera had an inning here and there. When Macbeth looks forth from his battlements to see Birnam Wood apparently moving upon Dunsinane in fulfillment of the prophecy, and he cries out,

photography is able to show Malcolm, old Siward, Macduff and their men advancing from Birnam upon the castle of Dunsinane, each man