Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (181 page)

As for the metaphors Shakespeare draws from dress, and the aphorisms he makes on it, his hits at the costume of his age, particularly at the ridiculous size of the ladies’ bonnets, and the many descriptions of the
mundus muliebris
, from the long of Autolycus in the
Winter’s Tale
down to the account of the Duchess of Milan’s gown in
Much Ado About Nothing
, they are far too numerous to quote; though it may be worth while to remind people that the whole of the Philosophy of Clothes is to be found in Lear’s scene with Edgar — a passage which has the advantage of brevity and style over the grotesque wisdom and somewhat mouthing metaphysics of
Sartor Resartus
.  But I think that from what I have already said it is quite clear that Shakespeare was very much interested in costume.  I do not mean in that shallow sense by which it has been concluded from his knowledge of deeds and daffodils that he was the Blackstone and Paxton of the Elizabethan age; but that he saw that costume could be made at once impressive of a certain effect on the audience and expressive of certain types of character, and is one of the essential factors of the means which a true illusionist has at his disposal.  Indeed to him the deformed figure of Richard was of as much value as Juliet’s loveliness; he sets the serge of the radical beside the silks of the lord, and sees the stage effects to be got from each: he has as much delight in Caliban as he has in Ariel, in rags as he has in cloth of gold, and recognises the artistic beauty of ugliness.

The difficulty Ducis felt about translating
Othello
in consequence of the importance given to such a vulgar thing as a handkerchief, and his attempt to soften its grossness by making the Moor reiterate ‘Le bandeau! le bandeau!’ may be taken as an example of the difference between
la tragédie philosophique
and the drama of real life; and the introduction for the first time of the word
mouchoir
at the Théâtre Français was an era in that romantic-realistic movement of which Hugo is the father and M. Zola the
enfant terrible
, just as the classicism of the earlier part of the century was emphasised by Talma’s refusal to play Greek heroes any longer in a powdered periwig — one of the many instances, by the way, of that desire for archaeological accuracy in dress which has distinguished the great actors of our age.

In criticising the importance given to money in
La Comédie Humaine
, Théophile Gautier says that Balzac may claim to have invented a new hero in fiction,
le héros métallique
.  Of Shakespeare it may be said he was the first to see the dramatic value of doublets, and that a climax may depend on a crinoline.

The burning of the Globe Theatre — an event due, by the way, to the results of the passion for illusion that distinguished Shakespeare’s stage-management — has unfortunately robbed us of many important documents; but in the inventory, still in existence, of the costume-wardrobe of a London theatre in Shakespeare’s time, there are mentioned particular costumes for cardinals, shepherds, kings, clowns, friars, and fools; green coats for Robin Hood’s men, and a green gown for Maid Marian; a white and gold doublet for Henry the Fifth, and a robe for Longshanks; besides surplices, copes, damask gowns, gowns of cloth of gold and of cloth of silver, taffeta gowns, calico gowns, velvet coats, satin coats, frieze coats, jerkins of yellow leather and of black leather, red suits, grey suits, French Pierrot suits, a robe ‘for to goo invisibell,’ which seems inexpensive at £3, 10s., and four incomparable fardingales — all of which show a desire to give every character an appropriate dress.  There are also entries of Spanish, Moorish and Danish costumes, of helmets, lances, painted shields, imperial crowns, and papal tiaras, as well as of costumes for Turkish Janissaries, Roman Senators, and all the gods and goddesses of Olympus, which evidence a good deal of archaeological research on the part of the manager of the theatre.  It is true that there is a mention of a bodice for Eve, but probably the
donnée
of the play was after the Fall.

Indeed, anybody who cares to examine the age of Shakespeare will see that archaeology was one of its special characteristics.  After that revival of the classical forms of architecture which was one of the notes of the Renaissance, and the printing at Venice and elsewhere of the masterpieces of Greek and Latin literature, had come naturally an interest in the ornamentation and costume of the antique world.  Nor was it for the learning that they could acquire, but rather for the loveliness that they might create, that the artists studied these things.  The curious objects that were being constantly brought to light by excavations were not left to moulder in a museum, for the contemplation of a callous curator, and the
ennui
of a policeman bored by the absence of crime.  They were used as motives for the production of a new art, which was to be not beautiful merely, but also strange.

Infessura tells us that in 1485 some workmen digging on the Appian Way came across an old Roman sarcophagus inscribed with the name ‘Julia, daughter of Claudius.’  On opening the coffer they found within its marble womb the body of a beautiful girl of about fifteen years of age, preserved by the embalmer’s skill from corruption and the decay of time.  Her eyes were half open, her hair rippled round her in crisp curling gold, and from her lips and cheek the bloom of maidenhood had not yet departed.  Borne back to the Capitol, she became at once the centre of a new cult, and from all parts of the city crowded pilgrims to worship at the wonderful shrine, till the Pope, fearing lest those who had found the secret of beauty in a Pagan tomb might forget what secrets Judaea’s rough and rock-hewn sepulchre contained, had the body conveyed away by night, and in secret buried.  Legend though it may be, yet the story is none the less valuable as showing us the attitude of the Renaissance towards the antique world.  Archaeology to them was not a mere science for the antiquarian; it was a means by which they could touch the dry dust of antiquity into the very breath and beauty of life, and fill with the new wine of romanticism forms that else had been old and outworn.  From the pulpit of Niccola Pisano down to Mantegna’s ‘Triumph of Caesar,’ and the service Cellini designed for King Francis, the influence of this spirit can be traced; nor was it confined merely to the immobile arts — the arts of arrested movement — but its influence was to be seen also in the great Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so important that large prints were made of them and published — a fact which is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such kind.

And this use of archaeology in shows, so far from being a bit of priggish pedantry, is in every way legitimate and beautiful.  For the stage is not merely the meeting-place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.  Sometimes in an archaeological novel the use of strange and obsolete terms seems to hide the reality beneath the learning, and I dare say that many of the readers of
Notre Dame de Paris
have been much puzzled over the meaning of such expressions as
la casaque à mahoitres
,
les voulgiers
,
le
gallimard taché d’encre
,
les craaquiniers
, and the like; but with the stage how different it is!  The ancient world wakes from its sleep, and history moves as a pageant before our eyes, without obliging us to have recourse to a dictionary or an encyclopaedia for the perfection of our enjoyment.  Indeed, there is not the slightest necessity that the public should know the authorities for the mounting of any piece.  From such materials, for instance, as the disk of Theodosius, materials with which the majority of people are probably not very familiar, Mr. E. W. Godwin, one of the most artistic spirits of this century in England, created the marvellous loveliness of the first act of
Claudian
, and showed us the life of Byzantium in the fourth century, not by a dreary lecture and a set of grimy casts, not by a novel which requires a glossary to explain it, but by the visible presentation before us of all the glory of that great town.  And while the costumes were true to the smallest points of colour and design, yet the details were not assigned that abnormal importance which they must necessarily be given in a piecemeal lecture, but were subordinated to the rules of lofty composition and the unity of artistic effect.  Mr. Symonds, speaking of that great picture of Mantegna’s, now in Hampton Court, says that the artist has converted an antiquarian motive into a theme for melodies of line.  The same could have been said with equal justice of Mr. Godwin’s scene.  Only the foolish called it pedantry, only those who would neither look nor listen spoke of the passion of the play being killed by its paint.  It was in reality a scene not merely perfect in its picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic also, getting rid of any necessity for tedious descriptions, and showing us, by the colour and character of Claudian’s dress, and the dress of his attendants, the whole nature and life of the man, from what school of philosophy he affected, down to what horses he backed on the turf.

And indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some form of art.  I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lemprière’s Dictionary is of far more value to us than Professor Max Müller’s treatment of the same mythology as a disease of language.  Better
Endymion
than any theory, however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic among adjectives!  And who does not feel that the chief glory of Piranesi’s book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?  Art, and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world.  But the sixteenth century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio also.  Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress of its neighbours.  Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary.  At the beginning of the century the
Nuremberg Chronicle
, with its two thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century was over seventeen editions were published of Munster’s
Cosmography
.  Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the hand of Titian.

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their knowledge.  The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various forms of contemporary dress.  After the departure from England, for instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the strange attire of their visitors.  Later on London saw, perhaps too often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an important influence on English costume.

And the interest was not confined merely to classical dress, or the dress of foreign nations; there was also a good deal of research, amongst theatrical people especially, into the ancient costume of England itself: and when Shakespeare, in the prologue to one of his plays, expresses his regret at being unable to produce helmets of the period, he is speaking as an Elizabethan manager and not merely as an Elizabethan poet.  At Cambridge, for instance, during his day, a play of
Richard The Third
was performed, in which the actors were attired in real dresses of the time, procured from the great collection of historical costume in the Tower, which was always open to the inspection of managers, and sometimes placed at their disposal.  And I cannot help thinking that this performance must have been far more artistic, as regards costume, than Garrick’s mounting of Shakespeare’s own play on the subject, in which he himself appeared in a nondescript fancy dress, and everybody else in the costume of the time of George the Third, Richmond especially being much admired in the uniform of a young guardsman.

For what is the use to the stage of that archaeology which has so strangely terrified the critics, but that it, and it alone, can give us the architecture and apparel suitable to the time in which the action of the play passes?  It enables us to see a Greek dressed like a Greek, and an Italian like an Italian; to enjoy the arcades of Venice and the balconies of Verona; and, if the play deals with any of the great eras in our country’s history, to contemplate the age in its proper attire, and the king in his habit as he lived.  And I wonder, by the way, what Lord Lytton would have said some time ago, at the Princess’s Theatre, had the curtain risen on his father’s Brutus reclining in a Queen Anne chair, attired in a flowing wig and a flowered dressing-gown, a costume which in the last century was considered peculiarly appropriate to an antique Roman!  For in those halcyon days of the drama no archaeology troubled the stage, or distressed the critics, and our inartistic grandfathers sat peaceably in a stifling atmosphere of anachronisms, and beheld with the calm complacency of the age of prose an Iachimo in powder and patches, a Lear in lace ruffles, and a Lady Macbeth in a large crinoline.  I can understand archaeology being attacked on the ground of its excessive realism, but to attack it as pedantic seems to be very much beside the mark.  However, to attack it for any reason is foolish; one might just as well speak disrespectfully of the equator.  For archaeology, being a science, is neither good nor bad, but a fact simply.  Its value depends entirely on how it is used, and only an artist can use it.  We look to the archaeologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.