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Prefaces to Shakespeare [Vols I-IV] by Granville-Barker . New Delhi : Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2007; with a General Preface by Mohit K. Ray

General Preface :

Son of a mother who was a teacher of elocution Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) who hyphenated his name after the first World War, became an actor when he was just fourteen years old. During the period from 1904-1907 he directed at the Royal Court Theatre with remarkable success several productions But it was during the period from 1910 to 1913 when he was at the Savoy that he revolutionized Shakespearean productions with his highly imaginative approach from the practical perspective of the producer. He saw Shakespeare as a man of the theatre, and thus gave a lie to Lamb's contention – a view held by the Romantic critics in general – that the plays of Shakespeare ‘are less calculated for performance on a stage, than those of any dramatist whatsoever'. Lamb had emphasized on the richness of Shakespeare's poetry the magic of which he thought is lost on the stage. He believed that the stage-representation, however skilful and creative cripples our imagination. He remarked : ‘The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted….to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking- stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him.' He further clarifies: ‘The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimensions, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. … On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, - we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exacting its powers, as the wind blows where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind'.

But Granville-Barker, as an actor, producer, a Shakespearean scholar, and above all a dramatist had the necessary experience and expertise to arrive at the conviction that a drama is meant for the stage. For Granville-Barker the play is the thing. Only one must be, as he supremely was, steeped in Elizabethan lore, and know, as he knew so thoroughly well, the circumstances leading to the production of the plays and the conditions under which they were produced in Shakespeare's time. If King Lear had been produced successfully on the Elizabethan stage, it could be produced with equal success on a twentieth century stage provided one was able to produce it according to the Elizabethan theatrical conventions, adapting it simultaneously to the demands of a modern theatre .Halliday writes: ‘His productions at the Savoy theatre of The Winter's Tale and Twelfth Night in 1912 and of A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1914 were revolutionary; with the aid of a false proscenium, proscenium doors, and built-out apron stage without footlights, he converted the picture- frame theatre into something like the Elizabethan; then, to make time for the unabridged texts, scenery was formalized, here was only one interval, the pace of acting and speaking was quickened, and traditional ‘business' cut out. ….their influence on later productions has been incalculable'.

Granville-Barker's historical scholarship, his profound knowledge of Shakespeare's stage craft and his personal experience as a successful man of theatre went a long way in making his Shakespearean productions so eminently successful that no less a severe critic than G.B.Harrison who was the general editor of the Penguin Shakespeare (1937-59) based on the Folio text and had edited with Granville-Barker, A Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1934) conceded that they were ‘the most important productions for a hundred years not only because they were beautiful in themselves, but because for the first time since the seventeenth century Shakespeare's plays were played just as they were written, and not cut and re-arranged to suit the scene-shifter'. He further added: ‘Without unduly horrifying his audiences, Granville-Barker evolved settings which allowed him to give the whole play entire and quickly. For Twelfth Night the main setting was a formal conventional garden with Noah's ark, trees and a central staircase branching out right and left, which needed little rearrangement. For the smaller scenes, the drinking scene, for instance- he inserted a little tapestried room and not the usual baronial hall, which made the whole affair cosy and hearty. He suppressed all the traditional foolery, the candles-to-bed business of Toby and Andrew, and he produced the play as whole, as a symphony. The result, astonishing at the time, was that Twelfth Night instead of being just a romp, became exquisitely beautiful and hauntingly sad'. So it is not surprising that Twelfth Night had a run of 137 performances. For Granville-Barker, as Clare Byrne has rightly pointed out, the ‘staging of any scene was determined not by principles or by a rigid stagecraft, but by knowledge of how, in practice, to get the best theatrical effect out of it, to convey the dramatist's intention'.

The Prefaces originally published in five series between1927 and 1947 covering ten plays are now collected in four volumes. The Shakespearean criticism that we find in the prefaces may be described as what Eliot called ‘workshop criticism'- a craftsman talking about his craft. In other words, the prefaces are elaborate explications of what shaped the productions, and how and why. And, for Harrison whom we have already quoted at length the prefaces are the ‘finest examples of Shakespearean criticism which have been written since Samuel Johnson. An hour in his company taught one more of Shakespeare than a year's reading'. John Gielgud, the noted Shakespearean actor who played the role of King Lear is reported to have remarked in an interview with The Times : ‘In 1940 I rehearsed the part with Granville-Barker for an hour and a half, day after day. Everything he said seared into my brain and I follow that interpretation still'. When Granville-Barker says that the ‘text of a play is a score waiting performance, and the performance and its preparation are, almost from the beginning a work of collaboration' he is anticipating the postmodern stance that a text is an empty container waiting to be filled with meaning and that the reader (and in this case the actor) is the co-author. Granville-Barker's fine perception of the rich and complex dramatic quality of Shakespeare's poetry is evident in the following comments:

‘The speaking of his verse must be studied, of course, in relation to the verse's own development. The actor must not attack its complexities in Antony and Cleopatra and Cymbeline , the mysterious dynamics of Macbeth , the nobilities of Othello , its final pastoral simplicities in A Winter's Tale and The Tempest without preliminary training in the lyricism, the swift brilliance and the masculine clarity of the earlier plays. About Antony and Cleopatra Granville-Barker points out that it is ‘a tragedy of sex without one single scene of sexual appeal' and hints at the challenge it throws to the actors to make the play theatrically effective. About soliloquy his fine insightful comments are: ‘With the soliloquy upon the platform stage it is a case – as is often where convention is concerned. - of extremes meeting. There is no illusion, so there is every illusion…. We now accept the convention frigidly, the actor manoeuvres with it timidly. Banished behind footlights into that other world of illusion, the solitary self-communing figure rouses our curiosity at best'. So he feels: ‘There is no more important task for the producer of Shakespeare than to restore to the soliloquy its rightful place in a play's economy, and in particular to regain for it full emotional effect'.

Granville-Barker shows practical wisdom when he says that ‘Shakespeare was not a perfect playwright;', and hastens to add, ‘there can be no such thing. Nor did he aim at a mechanical perfection, but at vitality , and this he achieved' (emphasis added). For Granville-Barker drama has a life of its own. It is an organic whole pulsating with life, and no observation of mechanical rules can ensure its theatrical success. The success of a play must be judged not by examining whether it has religiously observed a body of rules but by its success at the performance and by its reception of the audience. No production can be hammered into a mathematical formula. The unpredictable complexity of human nature simply defies it.

As Granville-Barker discusses the nature of the action in Hamlet he evinces a keen awareness of what is called ‘whirligig of time' in Shakespeare as he remarks; ‘… there in Shakespeare's freedom in time, which is the natural product of his stage's freedom is space and which – coupled with this – permits him a panoramic display of his entire story, if need be, and uninterrupted action'. His fine critical insight into the development of Shakespeare's dramatic art is evident in comments like, ‘We have in Claudius the makings of the central figure of a tragedy. Something of him will be found very highly developed in Macbeth'. Equally penetrating are his comments on the verse of Cymbeline : ‘The verse throughout is very rich in texture; and if sometimes it seems over-rich, this suits it to the frank artifice of the play, and the actors may allow themselves a certain slight sophistication of style for its delivery. Shakespeare in fact – the wheel come full circle- seems almost to be cultivating a new Euphuism. It has no close likeness to the old; by the difference, indeed, we may measure something of the distance he has traveled in twenty years of playwriting. It is Euphuism of imagination rather than expression'. That Granville-Barker is not a blind supporter of Shakespeare and would not indulge in any uncritical admiration of him is evident in the observations he makes about Brutus in Julius Caesar . He writes: ‘Shakespeare's own artistic disposition is not sufficiently attuned to this tragedy of intellectual integrity, of principles too firmly held. He can appreciate the nature of the man, but not, in the end, assimilate it imaginatively to his own'. The comments remind one of Eliot's criticism of Hamlet as a failure in ‘objective correlative'. About Antony and Cleopatra Granville-Barker's observations not only bear eloquent testimony to the profundity of his Shakespearean scholarship but also his remarkable capacity to see a play in a broad comparative perspective. He writes: ‘Here is the most spacious of the plays. It may lack the spiritual intimacy of Hamlet, the mysterious power of Macbeth, the nobilities of Othello, may reach neither to the heights nor depths of King Lear; but it has a magnificence and a magic all its own, and Shakespeare's eyes swept no wider horizon'. Similarly about Coriolanus he writes : ' Coriolanus cannot be ranked with the greatest of the tragedies. It lacks their transcendent vitality and metaphysical power. But while neither story nor characters evoke such qualities, those they do evoke are here in full measure. The play is notable for its craftsmanship. It is the work of a man who knows what the effect of each stroke will be, and wastes no one of them'. About Love's Labour's Lost his witty but profound comment is that it is ‘a fashionable play; now by three hundred years, out of fashion '. While discussing the producer's problems in presenting Love's Labour's Lost he reaffirms that for ‘the full appreciation of anything in Shakespeare some knowledge is asked of its why and wherefore' and that ‘Drama, as Shakespeare will come to write it, is, first and last, the projection of character in action; and devices for doing this, simple and complex, must make up three-quarters of its artistry. All the elements of a drama must contribute to the development of a character in action. If the character does not come to life, then all these elements are ‘like paper and sticks in a fireplace, the flaring and cracking counting for nothing if the fire itself won't light…'. Granville-Barker interprets Romeo and Juliet with a masterly analysis as a ‘lyric tragedy' as he examines The Merchant of Venice as a ‘fairy tale'. He discusses Othello in great detail- more than half the volume is devoted to this play – and shows how Shakespeare ‘converts the anonymous Moor into Othello' and how ‘the whole brutal story is raised to the heights of tragedy'. There is no point in multiplying examples. Granville-Barker's alert attention to the minutiae of a text and threadbare discussion of various aspects of the play – action, characters, construction, setting, versification, costumes, soliloquy etc. – reveal in every line the dramatic wealth of a Shakespearean play. The prefaces with their focus on the integrity of a play and its vitality have become a landmark of Shakespearean criticism. As a Shakespearean critic he may be regarded as one of the leading exponents of the modern historical approach to Shakespeare. T.S.Eliot has rightly remarked : ‘Perhaps more than any other single writer H.Granville-Barker by his prefaces, illuminating the plays with the understanding of the producer, has suggested the need for a synthesis of the several points of view from which Shakespeare can be studied'.

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I am grateful to Dr K.R.Gupta, Chairman, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors for requesting me to write the General Preface/Foreword, and also for making the invaluable Prefaces available to the teachers and the students of English literature and all those who are fond of the Bard of Avon.

Mohit K. Ray