I Do Not Know Whether Or Not It Was Because We Had Failed With The
Bull-Feast That We Failed To Go To Any Sort Of Public Entertainment In
Madrid.
It certainly was in my book to go to the theater, and see some
of those modern plays which
I had read so many of, and which I had
translated one of for Lawrence Barrett in the far-off days before the
flood of native American dramas now deluging our theater. That play was
"Un Drama Nueva," by Estebanez, which between us we called "Yorick's
Love" and which my very knightly tragedian made his battle-horse during
the latter years of his life. In another version Barrett had seen it
fail in New York, but its failure left him with the lasting desire to do
it himself. A Spanish friend, now dead but then the gifted and eccentric
Consul General at Quebec, got me a copy of the play from Madrid, and I
thought there was great reason in a suggestion from another friend that
it had failed because it put Shakespeare on the stage as one of its
characters; but it seemed to me that the trouble could be got over by
making the poet Heywood represent the Shakespearian epoch. I did this
and the sole obstacle to its success seemed removed. It went, as the
enthusiastic Barrett used to say, "with a shout," though to please him I
had hurt it all I could by some additions and adaptations; and though it
was a most ridiculously romantic story of the tragical loves of Yorick
(whom the Latins like to go on imagining out of Hamlet a much more
interesting and important character than Shakespeare ever meant him to
be fancied), and ought to have remained the fiasco it began, still it
gained Barrett much money and me some little.
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