771. RB to William Charles Macready
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 4, 294–296.
Camberwell
Sunday Night. [9 August 1840] [1]
So once again, dear Macready, I have failed to please you! The Druzes return, in another sense than I had hoped; [2] for though, to confess a truth, I have worked from the beginning somewhat in the spirit of the cucumber-dresser in the old story (the doctor, you remember, bids such an one “slice a plate full—salt it, pepper it, add oil, vinegar &c &c and then .. throw all behind the fire”)—spite of this, I did rather fancy that you would have “sympathized” with Djabal in the main scenes of my play; and your failing to do so is the more decisive against it, that I really had you here, in this little room of mine, while I wrote bravely away—here were you, propping the weak, pushing the strong parts (such I thought there might be!)—now majestically motionless, and now “laying about as busily, as the Amazonian dame Penthesilé” [3] —and here, please the fates, shall you again & again give breath and blood to some thin creation of mine yet unevoked—but elsewhere—enfoncé! [4] Your other objections I think less material—that the auditory, for instance, know nothing of the Druzes and their doings until I tell them (which is the very office I take on myself) that they are men & women oppressed and outraged in such and such ways and desirous of being rid of their oppressor and outrager: if the auditory thus far instructed (and I considered that point sufficiently made out) call for a previous acquaintance with the Druzes before they will go along with such a desire .. are they not worthy compatriots of the Hyde-park gentleman who “could not think of pulling a man out of the Serpentine to whom he had not been previously introduced”?
I intend to be with you in a day or two under the greenwood at Arden [5] —but, ask me whence the “banished Duke” [6] comes, why they banish him and how,—and you confound me .. who yet shall rejoice from my heart when Duke Frederick makes restitution at the end [6] —so much can “that one word, banished” (as Juliet says) effect! [7] Surely such matters are the “donnés,” the given quantities, the logical “be it conceded”-s, without which there is no working problem or deducing an ergo, [8] —and so it has been from the very dawn & cock-crow-time of the drama (—for it is edifying to observe how in some primitive Mystery (Johan à Tadcastre’s or Robert Leicestensis’ [9] essay in King John’s reign) the courtship of the Sultan of Mesopotamia’s daughter by the “King of Port’s” nephew shall have rivetted the attention of all London or St Albans for six hours together—) —And so I could remark on your other “misgivings”—the sole and simple point, let me say, on which I find you, to my judging, attackable: this note (written “on a spurt” at midnight and with a sad headache) is from me to you, and for no third overlookers: to the devil all flattery! with the exception of Miss Horton [10] there is not an actor or actress on the stage I can look at without loathing (that’s the word) beside yourself: they vulgarize, and bestialize—no matter, you will not comprehend me: Charles Kean I never saw (he talks about “these: hangmen’s hands”—“with a fine burst” (says a paper of yesterday)—and sees “gouts of blood” “with even a finer—.” I never saw him) [11] —why don’t you force the whole herd to run violently down a steep place into the sea? [12] Kean wants to be Macbeth three times a week .. people go to see if he can manage it; you are & have been this—how many years?—Macbeth—as everybody knows: why not be something else? Were I you (save the mark!)—it should be my first condition with a playwright that his piece should be new, essentially new for better or for worse: if it failed .. who that has seen you perform in some forty or fifty parts I could name, would impute the failure to you who were Iago on Thursday and Virginius [13] on Saturday? If it did not fail .. were it even some poor Return of the Druzes, it would be something yet unseen, in however poor a degree—something, therefore, to go and see. Laugh at all this—I write, indeed, that you may .. for is it not the characteristic of those who withdraw from “the scene” to “take on us the mystery of things, as if [we] were God’s spies”?– “And we’ll wear out, in a walled prison” (my room here) “sects & packs of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon”! [14] —for tomorrow will I betimes break new ground with So & So—an epic in so many books … let it but do me half the good “Sordello” has done—be praised by the units, cursed by the tens, and unmeddled with by the hundreds! God bless you, dear Macready, send you the Man and the Tragedy and how both of you will be hailed from the back of the boxes, by,
Yours ever
R Browning
I have left out the essential amid this chatter—and have not thanked you for your offer to forward my play to Webster: [15] He knows by this, I should say, another mode in which performances he ought to approve of, reach him! “I will rather sue to be despised!” [16] —or send it to Madame Vestris [17] leaving your name out by a pure oversight! Keep it safe, please, till I call on you some morning this week.
Publication: NL, pp. 20–23 (as [23 August 1840]).
Manuscript: Yale University.
1. Dated by reference to the newspaper article on Kean.
2. Despite Macready’s negative comments, RB did not abandon hopes of having the play staged. Macready recorded in his diary for 27 August that RB “really wearied me … with his self-opinionated persuasions upon his Return of the Druses. I fear he is for ever gone” (Macready, II, 76). After a second reading of the latest version, Macready’s final judgement was that the play was “mystical, strange and heavy” (Macready, II, 80). The play was not published until 1843, and, as far as is known, was never performed in RB’s lifetime.
3. Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, assisted Priam in the Trojan Wars and was slain by Achilles. RB’s quotation is a paraphrase of Spenser’s lines: “Full fiercely layde the Amazon about, / And dealt her blowes unmercifully sore” (The Faerie Queene, bk. V, 7, 31, 1–2).
4. “Done for!”
5. The setting for As You Like It, here intended as a poetic reference to Macready’s home at Elstree.
6. In As You Like It.
7. Romeo and Juliet, III, 2, 113.
8. “Therefore.”
9. John of Tadcaster, Robert of Leicester—names invented by RB to make a point.
10. Priscilla Horton, a young actress whose range extended from the Fool in Lear to Juliet.
11. Charles John Kean (1811?–68) was sharing the season at the Haymarket with Macready, and was his principal rival. Perhaps because of this, RB’s assertion “I never saw him” may be taken as an expression of loyalty to Macready. The article referred to was a review of Kean’s final performance of the season, in the role of Macbeth; it appeared in The Times of 8 August 1840.
12. Matthew, 8:32.
13. In the play of that name by James Sheridan Knowles, first produced in 1820, and one of Macready’s favourite roles.
14. King Lear, V, 3, 16–19.
15. In his diary for 12 August, Macready recorded: “Browning called, and … talked of his play and of Sordello, and I most honestly told him my opinion on both … He wished me to have his play done for nothing. I explained to him that Mr. Webster would not do it” (Macready, II, 73).
16. Othello, II, 3, 277.
17. Lucia Elizabeth Mathews (née Bartolozzi, 1797–1856), professionally known as Mme. Vestris, had a career as a singer and actress from 1815 until 1828. In 1831 she became “the first female lessee the stage had known” when she assumed the management of the Olympic Theatre (DNB). Under the constraints of the Act of 1737 (see letter 767, note 3) the programmes she mounted were perforce less weighty than those at the Haymarket.
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