The Admirable Bashville is a
product of the British law of copyright. As that law stands at
present, the first person who patches up a stage version of a
novel, how- ever worthless and absurd that version may be, and
has it read by himself and a few confederates to another con-
federate who has paid for admission in a hall licensed for
theatrical performances, secures the stage rights of that novel,
even as against the author himself; and the author must buy him
out before he can touch his own work for the purposes of the
stage.
A famous case in point is the drama of East Lynne, adapted
from the late Mrs Henry Wood's novel of that name. It was
enormously popular, and is still the surest refuge of touring
companies in distress. Many authors feel that Mrs Henry Wood was
hardly used in not getting any of the money which was plentifully
made in this way through her story. To my mind, since her
literary copyright probably brought her a fair wage for the work
of writing the book, her real grievance was, first, that her name
and credit were attached to a play with which she had nothing to
do, and which may quite possibly have been to her a detestable
travesty and pro- fanation of her story and second, that the
authors of that play had the legal power to prevent her from
having any version of her own performed, if she had wished to
make one.
There is only one way in which the author can protect himself;
and that is by making a version of his own and going through the
same legal farce with it. But the legal farce involves the hire
of a hall and the payment of a fee of two guineas to the King's
Reader of Plays. When I wrote Cashel Byron's Profession I had no
guineas to spare, a common disability of young authors. What is
equally common, I did not know the law. A reasonable man may
guess a reasonable law ; but no man can guess a foolish anomaly.
Fortunately, by the time my book so suddenly revived in America,
I was aware of the danger, and in a position to protect myself by
writing and performing The Admirable Bashville. The prudence of
doing so was soon demonstrated; for rumors soon reached me of
several American stage versions and one of these has actually
been played in New York, with the boxing scenes under the
management (so it is stated) of the eminent pugilist Mr James
Corbett. The New York press, in a somewhat derisive vein,
conveyed the impression that in this version Cashel Byron sought
to interest the public rather as the last of the noble race of
the Byrons of Dorsetshire than as his unromantic self; but in
justice to a play which I never read, and an actor whom I never
saw, and who honorably offered to treat me as if I had legal
rights in the matter, I must not accept the newspaper evidence as
conclusive.
As I write these words, I am promised by the King in his
speech to Parliament a new Copyright Bill. I believe it embodies,
in our British fashion, the recom- mendations of the book
publishers as to the concerns of the authors, and the notions of
the musical publishers as to the concerns of the playwrights. As
author and playwright I am duly obliged to the Commission for
saving me the trouble of speaking for myself, and to the wit-
nesses for speaking for me. But unless Parliament takes the
opportunity of giving the authors of all printed works of
fiction, whether dramatic or narrative, both playright and
copyright (as in America), such to be independent of any
insertions or omissions of formulas about "all rights reserved"
or the like, I am afraid the new Copyright Bill will leave me
with exactly the opinion both of the copyright law and the wisdom
of Parliament I at present entertain. As a good Socialist I do
not at all object to the limitation of my right of property in my
own works to a comparatively brief period, followed by complete
Communism: in fact, I cannot see why the same salutary limitation
should not be applied to all property rights whatsoever; but a
system which enables any alert sharper to acquire property rights
in my stories as against myself and the rest of the community
would, it seems to me, justify a rebellion if authors were
numerous and warlike enough to make one.
It may be asked why I have written The Admirable Bashville in
blank verse. My answer is that I had but a week to write it in.
Blank verse is so childishly easy and expeditious (hence, by the
way, Shakespear's copious output), that by adopting it I was
enabled to do within the week what would have cost me a month in
prose.
Besides, I am fond of blank verse. Not nineteenth century
blank verse, of course, nor indeed, with a very few exceptions,
any post-Shakespearean blank verse. Nay, not Shakespearean blank
verse itself later than the histories. When an author can write
the prose dialogue of the first scene in
As You Like It, or Hamlet's colloquies with Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, there is really no excuse for The Seven Ages
and "To be or not to be", except the excuse of a haste that made
great facility indispensable. I am quite sure that any one who is
to recover the charm of blank verse must frankly go back to its
beginnings and start a literary pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, I
like the melodious sing-song, the clear simple one-line and
two-line sayings, and the occasional rhymed tags, like the half
closes in an eighteenth century symphony, in Peele, Kyd, Greene,
and the histories of Shakespear. How any one with music in him
can turn from Henry VI., John, and the two Richards to such a
mess of verse half developed into rhetorical prose as Cymbeline,
is to me explicable only by the uncivil hypothesis that the
artistic qualities in the Elizabethan drama do not exist for most
of its critics; so that they hang on to its purely prosaic
content, and hypnotize themselves into absurd exaggerations of
the value of that content. Even poets fall under the spell. Ben
Jonson described Marlowe's line as "mighty"! As well put Michael
Angelo's epitaph on the tombstone of Paolo Uccello. No wonder
Jonson's blank verse is the most horribly disagreeable product in
literature, and in- dicates his most prosaic mood as surely as
his shorter rhymed measures indicate his poetic mood. Marlowe
never wrote a mighty line in his life: Cowper's single phrase
"Toll for the brave" drowns all his mightinesses as Great Tom
drowns a military band. But Marlowe took that very
pleasant-sounding rigmarole of Peele and Greene, and added to its
sunny daylight the insane splendors of night, and the cheap
tragedy of crime. Because he had only a common sort of brain, he
was hopelessly beaten by Shakespear; but he had a fine ear and a
soaring spirit: in short, one does not forget "wanton Arethusa's
azure arms" and the like. But the pleasant- sounding rigmarole
was the basis of the whole thing; and as long as that rigmarole
was practised frankly for the sake of its pleasantness, it was
readable and speak- able. It lasted until Shakespear did to it
what Raphael did to Italian painting: that is, overcharged and
burst it by making it the vehicle of a new order of thought,
involving a mass of intellectual ferment and psychological
research. The rigmarole could not stand the strain; and
Shakespear's style ended in a chaos of half-shattered old forms,
half-emancipated new ones, with occasional bursts of prose
eloquence on the one hand, occasional delicious echoes of the
rigmarole, mostly from Calibans and masque personages, on the
other, with, alas! a great deal of filling up with formulary
blank verse which had no purpose except to save the author's time
and thought.
When a great man destroys an art form in this way, its ruins
make palaces for the clever would-be great. After Michael Angelo
and Raphael, Giulio Romano and the Carracci. After Marlowe and
Shakespear, Chapman and the Police News poet Webster. Webster's
speciality was blood: Chapman's, balderdash. Many of us by this
time find it difficult to believe that pre-Ruskinite art
criticism used to prostrate itself before the works of
Domenichino and Guido, and to patronize the modest little
beginnings of those who came between Cimabue and Masaccio. But we
have only to look at our own current criticism of Elizabethan
drama to satisfy ourselves that in an art which has not yet found
its Ruskin or its pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the same folly is
still academically propagated. It is possible, and even usual,
for men professing to have ears and a sense of poetry to snub
Peele and Greene and grovel before Fletcher and Websterâ?"
Fletcher! a facile blank verse penny-a-liner: Webster! a turgid
paper cut-throat. The subject is one which I really cannot pursue
without intemperance of language. The man who thinks The Duchess
of Malfi better than David and Bethsabe is outside the pale, not
merely of literature, but almost of humanity.
Yet some of the worst of these post-Shakespearean duffers,
from Jonson to Heywood, suddenly became poets when they turned
from the big drum of pseudo-Shak- spearean drama to the pipe and
tabor of the masque, exactly as Shakespear himself recovered the
old charm of the rigmarole when he turned from Prospero to Ariel
and Caliban. Cyril Tourneur and Heywood could cer- tainly have
produced very pretty rigmarole plays if they had begun where
Shakespear began, instead of trying to begin where he left off.
Jonson and Beaumont would very likely have done themselves credit
on the same terms: Marston would have had at least a chance. Mas-
singer was in his right place, such as it was; and one can
respect the gentle Shirley, who was never born to storm the
footlights. Webster could have done no good anyhow or anywhere:
the man was a fool. And Chap- man would always have been a
blathering unreadable pedant, like Landor, in spite of his
classical amateurship and respectable strenuosity of character.
But with these exceptions it may plausibly be held that if
Marlowe and Shakespear could have been kept out of their way, the
rest would have done well enough on the lines of Peele and
Greene. However, they thought otherwise; and now that their
freethinking paganism, so dazzling to the pupils of Paley and the
converts of Wesley, offers itself in vain to the disciples of
Darwin and Nietzsche, there is an end of them. And a good
riddance, too.
Accordingly, I have poetasted The Admirable Bash- ville in the
rigmarole style. And lest the Webster worshippers should declare
that there is not a single correct line in all my three acts, I
have stolen or paraphrased a few from Marlowe and Shakespear (not
to mention Henry Carey); so that if any man dares quote me
derisively, he shall do so in peril of inadvertently lighting on
a purple patch from Hamlet or Faustus.
I have also endeavored in this little play to prove that I am
not the heartless creature some of my critics take me for. I have
strictly observed the established law^s of stage popularity and
probability. I have simplified the char- acter of the heroine,
and summed up her sw^eetness in the one sacred word: Love. I have
given consistency to the heroism of Cashel. I have paid to
Morality, in the final scene, the tribute of poetic justice. I
have restored to Patriotism its usual place on the stage, and
gracefully acknowledged The Throne as the fountain of social
honor. I have paid particular attention to the construction of
the play, which will be found equal in this respect to the best
contemporary models.
And I trust the result will be found satisfactory.
