THE TRUTH OF MASKS [6]
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