Download Early Twentieth- 20 th C entury . European Touring Stars and the

Early Twentieth- Century European Touring Stars
and the Distinction of the Spanish Actor-Manager
Juan F. Cerdá
(University of Murcia)
Mi casa no es su casa
The latest? study of Shakespearean performance in non-English-speaking countries —
what Dennis Kennedy referred to as Foreign Shakespeare in his book of 1993 — has
been interested in the limitations of the idea of a universal Shakespeare:
Any approach to Shakespeare that inquires about his prevalence in world culture is obliged
to notice that he is not valued everywhere. Claims of Shakespeare’s universality cannot be
substantiated, at least on a literal level, since there are numerous areas in which he is not
read, performed, or studied with enthusiasm (Kennedy 1993: 290).
According to Dennis Kennedy, major apathetic unsympathetic? locations include
Islamic countries (really?), Southeast Asia (really?) and most of Africa, yet he also
called attention to indifference and hostility towards the Bard within his own Western
cultural limits. In Europe, Kennedy claimes,
France proved particularly resistant until the second half of the twentieth century. Most
pointedly, Shakespeare is infrequently performed in the Iberian languages – and it’s worth
mentioning that more people in the world speak Spanish as their first language than any
other European tongue (Kennedy 1993: 290).
Kennedy’s idea deserves a brief comment. As problematic as Shakespeare’s Portuguese
and Spanish reception might be, the Iberian languages include Catalan, for which,
especially since the late nineteenth-century rebirth of Catalan culture or renaixença,
Shakespeare has been a steady cultural catalyst, to use Kathleen McLuskie’s latest
formulation.i Other than that, Kennedy’s words apply for what he probably had in mind
at the time of writing, that is, the Portuguese and Spanish-speaking part of the
peninsula. There, indeed, Shakespeare has suffered from the fact that Spain, a nation
very much influenced by French culture throughout the eighteenth and the nineteenth
centuries, has shared much of its reticence towards Shakespeare, and it is only during
the very recent post-Francoist era that Spanish performances of Shakespeare have
caught up in pace with other European nations.ii
If compared to these other locations, Start here and cut what comes before.
Shakespeare’s limited success on the Spanish stage might strike some as an anomaly.
After all, Spain, like Britain, is part of the geographical conceptualisation of Europe,
and the cultural idea of Europe may be understood to at least partly rest on the shared
experience of its transnational cultural champions. In a way, right after Britain, Europe
should feel closer to home than anywhere in Shakespeare’s worldwide stage. Put in a
different way, one may be more inclined to accept Shakespeare’s untimeliness outside
his Western cultural habitat — like in Asia, characterised by Dennis Kennedy as “an
area of the world that has no inherent reason to call on Shakespeare” (2010: xiii, my
emphasis). Yet how should one suspect such a lack of communication between nations
with such geographical and, if we accept this kind of inclusive idea of Europe, cultural
closeness? As part of European culture, should not Shakespearean performance be
inherent to Spanish culture too?
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British and American scholars have so far provided succinct and in different
degrees unsatisfactory explanations for the difficult relationship between Shakespearean
performance and the Spanish language (for the problem does not only involve Spain but
it can at least partly be extended to Spanish-speaking Latin America). For example,
Samuel Leiter claimed that the “dearth of successful Spanish-language productions”
reflects “the lack of worthwhile Spanish translations of the plays” (Leiter 1986: x).
Then, Kennedy relates the (comparative) scarceness of Shakespearean performance in
Spanish to a “competing canon of Spanish Renaissance drama” (Kennedy 1993: 290).
Another perspective is provided by Gary Taylor, who attributes the shortage of
Shakespearean productions in Latin America to the fact that Britain failed to colonise
the Central and Southern continents: “Where English imperialism faltered — in most of
Central and South America, for instance, where Spanish remains the prevalent colonial
language — Shakespeare has made little headway” (Taylor 1990: 379). However, as
much as Leiter, Kennedy and Taylor touch on key factors of Shakespeare’s reception in
Spanish — the linguistic transformations of the Shakespearean text, the canon of
Spanish early-modern drama and the post-colonial status of many Central and SouthAmerican nations — theirs are only preliminary (and slightly wayward) insights into the
vicissitudes of Shakespearean performance in Spain and, I presume, Latin America.
Analysing what Kennedy refers to as “competing colonial allegiances” is central
to an understanding of Shakespearean performance in Latin America (Kennedy 1993:
290), yet from a Spanish perspective it is oddly Anglo-centric to suggest that for the
sparseness of Shakespeare’s Latin American stagings by alluding to Britain’s absence.
While we eagerly wait for local voices to intervene,iii the Spaniard’s perspective — not
necessarily more entitled than the British or the American, yet the one offered in this
paper nonetheless — in turn argues that, If foreign influence should be inspected, it is
Spain’s cultural presence in Latin America that needs to be examined. In fact, the
presence of Spain and Europe in Latin America has not entirely been an obstacle to
Shakespearean performance (a point I sense hovers over Kennedy’s interpretation of
Taylor’s argument about Euro-American colonial and post-colonial relations). As I will
try to show, the fact that Shakespeare has been associated with Spanish and European
culture has complexly both hindered and promoted Shakespearean performance in the
Americas.
Together with this (this what?), Shakespeare’s reception in Spain has in many
ways intertwined with Spanish early-modern drama since its very outset.iv (overuse of
this syntactic structure. Divide into two sentneces. TIME TO LEAVE Kennedy behind.
Yet Kennedy’s argument about the negative effect of a competing Spanish canon is too
hasty: as much as the Bard was dragged into discussions about Spanish Golden Age
plays during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in terms of performance
Shakespeare has hardly ever competed against but next to Spanish early-modern drama.
It is no coincidence that in Madrid during the first decades of the twentieth century (the
spatial-temporal frame that serves as a pivotal centre for this paper), there were neither
that many performances of Lope, Calderón nor of Shakespeare.
Cut this paragraph por put ina footnote.
Then also, Leiter’s point about there not
being ‘worthwhile’ translations in Spanish is not only demeaning of a profuse tradition
that dates back to 1772.v Most pointedly, it displays the kind of Anglo-centric fixation
on Shakespeare’s language associated with the British-American construction of a
universal Shakespeare, an anxiety that, as Kennedy argued (1993: 1-3), is in turn
frequently absent in performances of Shakespeare’s plays in translation. If, as Leiter
assumes, language is such a determining factor in the performance of Shakespeare’s
plays, then how can Ermete Zacconi’s 1901 production of Othello, delivered in Italian
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to a homogeneous Spanish-speaking crowd, be the single most profitable box-office
success of a Shakespearean performance in Spain during much of the twentieth century?
The aim of this paper is to explain why Shakespeare’s plays were and were not
performed. {state your aim in positive, not genitive terms. And state it once, not twice.
I maintain that at the beginning of the twentieth century it is not Shakespeare’s
language, nor Spain’s early-modern playwrights nor Britain’s absence that primarily
need to be assessed, but the stagings of the Continental touring stars, the way they
defined Shakespearean performance in Spain and the cultural transactions established
with Latin America through this model of theatrical production. Sarah Bernhard, Ermete
Novelli and, especially, Ermete Zaconni provide the instances of a doubly foreign
Shakespeare, an intercultural mode of performance that brings to the surface the cultural
uses to which Shakespeare is put to work on the Spanish stage. These performances
where Shakespeare is stripped of his native language and then delivered by the French
or Italian star to a synchronically local and foreign audience constitute a third mode of
Shakespearean performance — not in English, not in translation — that provides a
direct route to Shakespeare’s problems on the Spanish stage. A “purer” sort of
Shakespeare in the way that, without the “distraction” of language, these performances
provide direct access to Shakespeare’s problematic position in Spanish theatrical
culture. It is through these French and, mainly, Italian Shakespeare productions and
through the evidence and discourses they produced that I then focus on the few Spanish
actor-managers that chose the few Shakespeare plays (Hamlet, Othello, The Taming of
the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice) to distinguish themselves from their fellow
thespians, a model of theatrical production borrowed from the prestigious Continental
stars that toured Spain at the turn of the twentieth century. This historical crossroads is
crucial for it illuminates the cultural hierarchies at work in the circulation and
distinction of these Spanish Shakespeares, as Spain’s recently faded colonial power
situated the nation in a pivotal, shifting position within Europe and Latin America.
Accordingly, this paper intends to contribute with a perspective into Spain’s export of
Shakespeare. For this, it traces the Continental origins of the upscale model of
Shakespearean performance and pursues it across the Atlantic to provide the coloniser’s
perspective on the cultural functions of the Shakespeare productions staged by the
Spanish actors on tour in the former colonies.
Yet, as much as one can be starstruck by the prestigious names associated with
Shakespeare at the time (the Continental Bernhardt, Novelli, Zaconni, and the local stars
Emilio Thuillier, José Tallaví, Ricardo Calvo, Francisco Morano, Enrique Borrás and
Margarita Xirgu), Shakespeare was almost exclusively viable through a kind of elitist
circulation which determined that, however outstanding, he mostly remained a marginal
presence on the Spanish stage. Especially if weighed against his presence in other
European nations, it is in these times of comparative hardship that one is most
powerfully reminded of; at no point should we assume that Shakespeare is inherent to
Spanish culture (already said that?). In that way, we should be as suspicious of the idea
that Asia “has [had] no overwhelming reason to turn to [Shakespeare]” (Kennedy 2010:
1), as we should be of assuming that Shakespearean performance in Spain, or any other
locality (supposedly) closer to Shakespeare, is not subject to similarly specific
conditions operating in the home culture. Shakespeare can indeed prove alien to venues
in close geographical proximity. Consequently, this paper intends to reach back to the
Spanish early twentieth century to interrogate the concrete material and symbolic
practices acting in the local sphere to account for Shakespeare’s uneven presence on the
Spanish stage. For the most part, there was no room for Shakespeare, and it is only
under certain conditions that his plays were chosen for the repertoire of the Spanish
3
actors. As others have noted, there was not that much Shakespeare in Spain before the
last few decades. However, the little Shakespeare there was is still quite significant.
Shakespeare’s European Provenance and the Touring Stars
The defeat against the US in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the subsequent
loss of Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Cuba was soon assimilated in Spain as
the end of an era. What is commonly referred to in modern Spanish historiography as
the “Disaster of 98” destroyed the nationalistic mental abstraction of imperial splendour
which started with Columbus in 1492, and now ended in 1898 to the dismay of the
colonisers. With Spanish foreign influence in a much-deteriorated state, the few pieces
of Spanish soil left in Africa hardly constituted an empire: that ‘where the sun never
set’, at least, was officially over. However, the gloomy aftermath of the Disaster
contrasted with an unprecedented expansion of theatre business, as retorted by
renowned theatre reviewer Manuel Bueno:
It is not the performing arts [...] that are most decayed in Spain. We are doing worse when
it comes to politicians and men of letters, and, still, there is no sign that the nation is going
to become extinct in the next two weeks, as is being prophesied by a few dandy pessimists
(Bueno 1903a: 1).
Call it escapism, but audiences in the capital were able to maintain dozens of theatre
companies, which by 1908 shared thirty-five venues that offered over 30.000 seats for a
population of about 600.000: with Spanish playwrights coming close to the
productiveness of their early modern ancestors, many of the most successful pens of the
period premiered six or more plays each year, and a single author could accumulate a
personal repertoire capable of providing a season’s supply for a theatre company (Oliva
2004: 22, 20).vi Playwrights and actors moved to the city, theatre companies toured the
Spanish provinces preparing their debuts in the capital, as Madrid thrived with
illustrated theatre magazines and reviews-filled newspapers. The Quintero brothers,
Jacinto Benavente, Pedro Muñoz Seca, Carlos Arniches (to name but a few of the most
successful playwrights), and Emilio Thuillier, Enrique Borrás, Ricardo Calvo, Margarita
Xirgu, Carmen Cobeña and Rosario Pino (to name but a few of the most successful
actors) all established a firm connection with the crowds’ preferences, and theatregoers
flocked to the downtown venues to often enough crowd the two performances put on in
theatres that opened seven days a week.vii From 1899 to 1913, the national register of
Spanish plays had already listed 20.000 titles, a copious catalogue for the dozens of
theatre companies led by actor-managers, coming and going from and to the nation’s
theatrical centre (Oliva 1999: 40).
Spain’s early twentieth-century theatrical bonanza could be presumed to
constitute propitious soil for the performance of Shakespearean drama, yet the fact is
that, among all this theatrical activity, the icon of Western drama struggled to maintain
visibility on a stage that was not crowded by early-modern but by contemporary
national talent. While the Quintero Brothers, Benavente and Arniches premiered dozens
of plays to crowded auditoriums, according to the data I have managed to recover
Spanish actors only put on four different Shakespeare plays in Madrid before the
Disaster of 1898 and the Civil War (1936). Of the four, The Merchant of Venice was
only performed once to unanimously appalling reviews. Then, I have confirmed only
five different productions of Othello and Hamlet in the almost forty years that go from
1898 to 1936. Instead, The Taming of the Shrew maintained a relatively steadier yet still
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modest continuity in the Madrid theatres thanks to Emilio Thuillier’s and Francisco
Morano’s productions in ten different theatrical seasons.viii In contrast to this, in 1907
the Spanish newspaper ABC published a short note titled “Shakespeare in Germany”:
According to statistics recorded for the 1906-1907 theatrical season, 24 plays by
Shakespeare were performed 1700 times on the German stage. The Merchant of Venice,
399 performances; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 253; Othello, 154; Romeo and Juliet,
153; Hamlet, 150; The Winter’s Tale, 139; King Lear, 52; Julius Caesar, 44; Ricardo III,
39; Macbeth, 23; Much Ado About Nothing, 21; and The Merry Wives of Winsord [sic], 18;
etc. (Anon. 1907: 6).
The numbers show how cultural circulation is not directly proportional to geographical
proximity and, perhaps too, of how the homogeneity of Shakespeare’s reception in
Europe may be as chimerical as a cohesive understanding of European culture.
Shakespeare reception in Spain in the early twentieth century certainly did not
look anything like Germany. Instead, it continued the trend of the nineteenth century,
where Spanish Shakespeares looked very much like French Shakespeares. To be
precise, during the nineteenth century it had not been the English Bard but the French
Jean-François Ducis and his adaptations of Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet that
made it onto the Spanish stage. Then, in the twentieth century, Ducis’ Othello was still a
substantial part of Francisco Luis de Retés’ Spanish version (written in 1864), which
continued to be performed at least as late as 1915. Then, the play-texts for the Spanish
productions of The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice also derived from
French adaptations — the former from Paul Delair’s 1891 adaptation (P. B. 1894:2),
and the latter from a 1830 four act play-text by Alfred de Vigny that omitted the scenes
after the trial and that, through different cuts, rewriting and alterations, “focused on the
Jew, rather than on the Merchant” (Rivas Cherif 1923: 10). The only recorded
performance of The Merchant of Venice in Madrid dates from 1923, and the Frenchoriginated Shrew was performed well into the 1930s at least.
Apart from these nineteenth-century French mediations, Shakespeare’s other
main way onto the early twentieth-century Madrid stage was through the touring
companies that came to perform in the capital. In comparison, taking into account the
number of local actor-managers involved in Shakespeare productions, the Bard was
reaching Madrid through foreign talent almost as much as through national
practitioners. However, another characteristic of Spanish performances of Shakespeare
in the period is their lack of contact with Britain, for no British Shakespearean actor
seems to have travelled to Spain since John Philip Kemble visited Madrid in 1802
where, although he attended Máiquez’s Othello, he did not perform at all (Gregor 2010:
24-25). Then, the staging of Twelfth Night in 1936 by a group of Oxbridge graduate
students at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid came too late to have any effect on
subsequent Shakespearean performance (Anon. 1936: 64-65). Right after that came the
Civil War and the closing down of the borders, which obstructed Spain’s cultural
contact with Europe and America, and continued to delay Shakespeare’s conquering of
the Spanish stage. The limited contact of Spanish actors and audiences with
Shakespearean performance in English language would, at best, come from newspaper
articles and other second-hand experiences, like reading Leonardo Williams’ short book
Algunos intérpretes ingleses de Hamlet (A Few English Hamlet Actors; Williams
1904).ix Consequently, of the dozens of reviews gathered, references to British actors in
the Madrid Shakespearean performances are scarce enough to be referenced thoroughly.
Irving is mentioned in passing in a review of Zacconi’s Othello of 1901 and
1923, and of Calvo’s Hamlet of 1923, while Beerbohm Tree is alluded to in connection
5
with Mounet-Sully’s Hamlet of 1904, where the English is thought to be superior to the
French (Caramanchel 1903: 2; Machado 1923: 4; ZEDA 1904b: 1). Apart from the
unprecedented familiarity with British and American Shakespearean performances of
Miss Teriosa, the anonymous (Miss Terious) reviewer of The Taming of the Shrew of
1899, of the Madrid journalists, Manuel Bueno from El Heraldo de Madrid and Manuel
Machado from La Libertad are the only ones who claim to have witnessed a
Shakespearean performance in English, and in both cases it was that of Irving, who
never performed in Spain (Miss Teriosa 1899: 1; B[ueno] 1903b: 1; Machado 1923: 4). x
In a period that extends from 1898 to 1936, I have found no reference to Poel, Granville
Barker, Bridges-Adams or to any of the period’s other Shakespeareans. Then, when one
of the few critics that had attended a Shakespearean performance in English reviewed
Tallaví’s Hamlet of 1913, the Spanish actor did not evoke British staging but the clothes
of Kemble’s portrait at the National Gallery in London, which could perhaps be read as
a metaphor for cultural distance and the way a Madrid performance of Hamlet could
only summon the silent image of a nineteenth-century British staging. Not only did the
mainstream stage in Madrid prove too competitive for the sustained success of
Shakespeare’s plays, but when a prestigious actor offered the Madrid audiences a
foreign performance it was the French and Italian stars and not the long absent British
Shakespeareans. On the Madrid stage, theatre did not depend on Shakespeare and,
onstage, Shakespearean drama did not depend on Britain either.
In contrast to the absence of British Shakespearean actors, the names of the
Continental actor-managers surface again and again in the critics’ comments on the
Spanish Shakespearean performances in Madrid. An archetypal example is one of the
reviews of Tallaví’s Hamlet of 1913 where, with no mention of Britain, the critic
explains the most salient features of every French and Italian Hamlet that had trod the
Madrid stage before the Spanish actor-manager. Thus, Sarah Bernhardt is recalled for
“the beauty of her attitudes”, Ermete Zacconi for the “act in the cemetery and the
infamous soliloquy”, Ferruccio Garavaglia for his only partial success, Jean MounetSully for the way he “almost absolutely displeased” the audience apart from his final
scenes and in his fight with Laertes, and Ermete Novelli for his professionalism and
theatricality (Caramanchel 1913: 6). As the reviews of the period show, the Spanish
Shakespearean actors were constantly evaluated through these iconic performances so,
at the time, “any actor that plays Hamlet on the Madrid stages [would] have to fight
with th[e] memories” of these Continental Shakespeares (Caramanchel 1913: 6).xi
The performances of the Italian stars determined the perception of the reviewers,
who measured the Spanish stagings against their Italian predecessors. For example,
Zacconi had included The Taming of the Shrew in his last repertoire in Madrid in 1923,
yet Novelli was seen as the iconic performer of the play. In turn, Zacconi provided the
guidelines for Hamlet and Othello. Then, both played The Merchant of Venice, which
defined the boundaries for the assessment of Morano’s production of 1923, where
Almicroa had focused on Shylock and omitted the scenes after the trial:
We have seen Novelli do it [in a comical way] and, in turn, [we have seen] Zacconi
according to his predominantly tragic character. Morano has opted for an intermediate
level, between comic and dramatic, and understood in that way, he does it to perfection (De
Laserna 1923: 3).
For Spanish actor-managers, entering the field of Shakespearean performance meant
associating themselves with such prestigious company, that is, it meant both aspiring
and risking one’s theatrical status in the comparison with the European stars. To some
extent, the Italians compensated for the symbolic absence of the British Shakespearean
6
actors by providing an inspirational model of prestigious internationalism, yet the way
that reviewers kept coming back to the Italian performances to measure the Spanish
actors — not infrequently, to the locals’ disadvantage — can be read as a symptom of
the cultural inferiority complex deriving from the Spanish Disaster of 98. After all,
Bueno’s perception that it was not the performing arts what were most decayed in Spain
or that the nation was not going to become extinct as was being prophesised by (not
really) a few dandy pessimists was a clear outburst of national pride triggered by
Zacconi’s foreign performance of The Taming of the Shrew. In that way, Bueno’s
rhetoric indicates that these foreign performances of Shakespeare prompted a kind of
competitive perception of the performing arts, which brought to light the insecurities
deriving from the nation’s decreasing political prominence amongst the European
nations.
That the Italian Shakespeareans were perceived to be in a position of cultural
superiority can be felt in other traces of Shakespeare’s Spanish reception. For example,
the reviewer from La Época provides a snapshot of cultural hierarchies at work when he
describes the audience in Zacconi’s Othello of 1913 as “filled with [Spanish] actors and
actresses” and when, engaging in conversation with one of them, he claims to been told:
“we have come to school” (ZEDA 1913: 1). At the same time, this kind of subservient
attitude towards the foreign performance of Shakespearean drama, together with the fact
that Shakespeare’s presence in Madrid rested on the performances of some of the most
prestigious European actors of the time tended to perpetuate Shakespeare’s upscale
status. This determined the kind of actor that would dare perform Shakespeare on the
Madrid stage, which constitutes a central feature in Shakespeare’s stage reception in the
capital. Such a disputed status allowed Shakespeare’s plays to reach certain audiences
yet also doomed them to remain within a somewhat restricted circulation, which
determined the very location where Shakespearean drama would be performed.
In Select Theatres Only
Rather than box-office hits with dozens of performances, Shakespeare and, especially,
Shakespearean tragedy provided demanding title-roles that, if performed within the
standards set by the Italians, would guarantee a kind of press coverage matched by few
other repertoire choices. Like the other European stars that had performed Shakespeare
in Madrid before him (Ristori, Rossi, Duse, Bernhardt and Novelli), Zacconi showed
the Spanish actor-managers how to attract select audiences to the downtown venues.
The iconic example is his performance of Othello in the first visit to Madrid in 1901:
People had paid theatre scalpers five hundred pesetas for some of the boxes; people had
paid fifty pesetas for last row seats [...] and up to four for general admission. All the ladies
that had just returned from Paris, those who hadn’t made their appearance to the Real
[opera house], were there. Among the males, there were lots of men of letters and painters,
almost the whole Medical Board and some politicians (Anon. 1901: 1).
This contrasts both with the opening of the review, titled “Misery and luxury”, where
the critic explains how that morning “ten thousand charity vouchers” were circulated
among the city’s “troubled widows, homeless orphans [and] unemployed workers”, and
with the ticket prices at the peripheral Pavón twenty-five years later (fixed cost of one
and a half and two pesetas), which shows both the social contrasts in Madrid between
the disasters and the appeal of Zacconi’s upper-class model of Shakespearean
performance (Anon. 1901: 1).
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Thus, although the not-so-privileged audiences showed support for the not-so
prestigious actor-managers in theatres like the Pavón, the better-established Spanish
Shakespeareans — Thuillier, Fuentes, Morano, Calvo, Tallaví, and Borrás —
predominantly performed Hamlet and Othello at first-class downtown venues, like the
Princesa, Comedia, Español and Lara. The reviewers show that the Spanish actormanagers consistently earned the applause of their select audiences at the
Shakespearean premieres, regardless of the fact that the crowds’ support would in many
cases wane soon after opening night. The low turnouts for Novelli and Zacconi’s
Shrews and the problems at the Pavón premiere of Hamlet are the only negative
audience responses recorded by the critics. Instead, as the reviews suggest, the rest of
the Shakespeare premieres are characterised by three features: the selling-out of the
venue, the audience’s enthusiastic response at the end of the performance, and the select
profile of the crowd. Again, already in his second visit to Madrid (1903), Zacconi’s
performances provide archetypal examples:
When the curtain fell, there was a delirious ovation [...] When I left the theatre, Zacconi had
been called back to the stage eight or ten times, and they kept calling him back, and
enthusiasm kept escalading (Caramanchel 1903: 2).
[The audience] that crowded the theatre [...] demonstrated its admiration for the artist on
countless occasions with tempests of applause and delirious acclaim (ZEDA 1913: 1).
A numerous and select audience [...] repeatedly acclaimed the distinguished artist (J. de L.
1923: 2).
Accordingly, the Shakespeare performances by the Spanish actor-managers are reported
in similar terms:
Thuillier’s Othello: The audience gave [Thuillier] a great standing ovation, making him
return to the stage ten or twelve times (Anon. 1905: 2).
Tallaví’s Hamlet: Actor of high-ranking artistry, [...] the audience, who filled the venue,
enthusiastically applauded at the end of each act and at the end with a warm ovation.
Tallaví had to return to the stage many times (S. A. 1913: 2).
Morano’s Hamlet: Ovation and callbacks to the stage at the end of each act (J. de L. 1915:
1).
Tallaví’s Othello: Welcomed by a select audience [...] with affectionate applause [...] The
curtain was raised in his honour at the end of each act (Anon. 1915: 1).
Calvo’s Hamlet: [The audience] applauded enthusiastically and fervently throughout the
night, as it did at the end of the performance with formidable ovations (Machado 1923: 4).
Even in Morano’s The Merchant of Venice of 1923, a production that was strongly
criticised by the press, the reviewer from La Época admits: “Our observations respond
to a personal criterion that should not tarnish the success of Mr. Morano, who was
applauded by a truly fervent audience (Fernández Almagro 1923: 1).
In any case, however influential the Italian actors were for the performance of
Shakespearean drama in Madrid, their Shakespearean productions account for an
insignificant share of the theatrical production in the period. Thus, Novelli spent a week
in Madrid in 1894 where he performed adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew and
Othello three times and The Merchant of Venice once, and ten days in 1896, where he
replaced The Merchant with four performances of Hamlet (Par 1936: II, 49-54). When
8
he returned in 1910, a final performance of The Merchant of Venice in the last day of
his run at the Lara theatre supposedly “erased, with its huge and regal intensity, the
small, old and false comedies that constituted the campaign just finished, in whose
repertoire the delicate wit of Goldoni, served, incidentally, in small doses, ha[d] perhaps
been the only pleasant thing” (Alsina 1910: 2). As far as I have been able to establish,
Zacconi visited Madrid in 1901 and 1903, and then twice in the next twenty years (1913
and 1923). On his first visit he gave a triumphal performance of Othello; in 1903, three
Othellos, and two Hamlets; in 1913, one performance of Othello; and, in 1923, one
Othello and two King Lears, together with one-day performances of plays by
D’Annunzio, Alfredo Testoni, Ibsen and Dumas. So, as much as the critics often
emphasised the excellence of their acting and as much as they constituted a powerful
symbolic presence in the period’s theatrical culture, their Shakespearean performances
in Italian are actually an exotic rarity within an industry of mass theatrical production.
Shakespearean drama was only profitable in short rotations yet, as
compensation, it fulfilled a cultural role that both promoted and exceeded the strictly
economic. If delivered to the standards of theatre critics, Spanish Shakespearean actors
could succeed in attracting effusive reviews that, most times, matched the audience’s
enthusiastic support. Then, based on the Italian model, Shakespearean drama provided
an interface where the audience, the actor-manager, the company and the venue all
participated in a self-differentiating and self-legitimising celebration of Shakespeare’s
cultural value. In that way, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Othello would be the season’s
showcase act for an actor-manager and his company at a new venue, like Fuentes in
1903, who chose to premiere his brand-new adaptation of Hamlet in his debut in
Madrid, or Thuillier in 1904, who chose The Taming of the Shrew to open his season at
the Princesa. Then, in 1915, Tallaví decides to programme Othello to start his season at
the Infanta Isabel and both present the theatre’s recent renovations, where the
production managed to gather “the most exquisite and select audience in Madrid” (Soler
1915: 1).
So, in parallel to the functioning of Madrid’s theatrical industry, in which
Shakespeare only played a limited part, Shakespearean drama is involved in a number
of cultural transactions that, although they may revert collaterally to the economic, are
also grounded on the symbolic. The cultural role of the prestigious French and,
especially, Italian touring companies needs to be emphasised here as they provided
direct contact with a theatrical presence that matched Shakespeare’s reputation. In that
way, Spanish actor-managers co-opted some of the Shakespearean aura that the Italians
had materialised on the Madrid stage by rechanneling it into their public theatrical
personae. This could be done at different stages in the actor-manager’s career. For
example, Fuentes had been touring the provinces and preparing a repertoire for his
debut in Madrid, which would eventually come in April 1903 with his production of
Hamlet at the Zarzuela, where the actor is portrayed, depending on the critic, as still an
aspiring actor (J. de L. 1903: 2; Floridor 1903: 9) or an upstart crow (Bueno 1903b: 1).
The reviewer from La Época pointed out: “the young actor has not reached the moon
with this slingshot, but his stone has gone further than that of other actors who are less
deserving of their glory” (ZEDA 1903: 1), yet another example of how Shakespearean
drama could readily trigger questions of status and reputation. As the French and the
Italians had shown first-hand, “Hamlet [was] a propitious play to sharpen competition
among artists and secure lasting fame” (Martín 1915: 3), a comment produced at
Morano’s opening of the theatrical season at the Princesa in 1915.
This also applies to Tallaví who, apart from a fleeting appearance at the old
Princesa (J. de L. 1913: 4), had not performed in the capital since 1902. Soon after his
9
return from extensive tours in the provinces and in the Americas, he produced his 1913
Hamlet, covered by the reviewer from El Imparcial: “Appearing now at the Español, at
the last stages of the season, his name has brought a new prestige to the [venue’s]
programme” (J. de L. 1913: 4), which shows the circularity of the Shakespearean
legitimising circuit. Another example is Borrás’ relationship with the Madrid stage. In
the mid-1910s, the actor worked under the guidance of early Spanish director Gregorio
Martínez Sierra, and the director’s letters show Borrás’ excitement about the prospect of
bringing a production of Hamlet to Madrid in his effort to consolidate his presence in
the capital after having already become an established actor on the Catalan stage. After
falling out with Martínez Sierra before he even made it to Madrid, Borrás continued to
establish his reputation through the Spanish classics and contemporary national talent.
Thus, it would not be until 1936 that the actor performed Shakespeare in the capital
when, at the age of seventy-three, he staged Othello at the Español, in a performance
that would inscribe him in the great tradition of Spanish Othellos, together with
Máiquez and Vico (A. E. 1936: 5).
Like positioning a Shakespeare play at the end of the repertoire (Bernhardt,
1899; Novelli, 1910; Calvo, 1930), performing Shakespeare at the end of an actor’s
career could also shape the performer’s public image, as in the case of Borrás’ Othello
of 1936, and Tallaví, who had been performing Hamlet less than two months before he
passed away in February 1916. Within the obituary’s elegiac narrative, which includes
references to the actor’s memorable performances, Tallaví is reported to have asked for
a mirror before undergoing his final surgery where, “remembering the words of Hamlet
at the cemetery”, he is claimed to have referred to himself as “[p]oor Yorik” (Anon.
1916: 1). In what echoes Zacconi’s realist approach to a construction of the character
through direct experience and research, Tallaví is also fictionalised as trying to “retain
in his memory the tortuous gesture to someday reproduce it onstage” (Anon. 1916: 1).
Unlike Fuentes’ use of Hamlet to make his debut in Madrid, in the case of the
reviewer’s inscription of Borrás as part of a national canon of Shakespearean
performances, and of the fictionalisation of Tallaví as the quintessential Shakespearean
actor, intentionality should be put on the journalists’ shoulders, which is symptomatic of
the way Shakespeare could circulate as a transcending cultural symbol in the reception
as much as in the production of Shakespeare’s plays. These, I believe, were all major
determining factors in Shakespeare’s presence on the Madrid stage, Shakespeare being
not so much an economic but a symbolic source of cultural prestige for the Spanish
actor-manager.
The Shakespeare Circuit: Continental and Latin-American Poles
Shakespeare’s accommodation to the higher end of the mainstream circuit, a selfdifferentiating, self-legitimating network of circular cultural transactions, accounts for
Shakespeare’s problematic presence in Madrid’s theatrical culture. Thus, of the many
theatre companies in the period, a limited number of actor-managers would commission
or select one of the available adaptations to trigger the Shakespearean event and
mobilise the rest of the interconnected processes. As I have tried to show, these
mobilisations bring to the surface Shakespeare’s theatrical boundaries and the socioeconomic and cultural struggles at stake in the production and reception of
Shakespeare’s work.
Moreover, Shakespearean performance in the period can be examined in terms
of origin and destination. Although my evidence is limited in this respect, certain traces
10
suggest that the period’s actor-managers and, with them, some of Shakespeare’s plays
were either coming from or on their way to Madrid. Certainly, Fuentes, Thuillier,
Morano and Santacana tuned their Shakespearean productions in tours around the
provinces before they reached the capital (López-Ballesteros and González Llana 1903:
5; Viana Cárdenas 1902: 2; Anon. 1913: 4; Anon. 1928b: 6). As the reviews and the
number of productions show, once there, they would measure up to severe critical
inspection and a competitive theatrical market. More research should be done to
establish how the actor-managers then used Shakespeare to capitalise on their position
as national theatrical icons in their tours around Spain yet, together with this, the
Spanish actor-managers also performed Shakespearean drama in Central and South
America which, together with the provinces, constituted the borders of Spanish
Shakespearean performance during the period. Yet, as I have tried to show, the early
twentieth-century upscale performance of Shakespeare’s plays in Madrid can be traced
back to a continental origin. At the level of the actor, the presence of the British
Shakespeareans, the natural inheritors of Shakespeare’s original value, circulated
weakly through echoes of their performances, yet the Italian actor replaced this presence
and became a parallel origin for Shakespeare’s theatrical grandeur. In turn, the Spanish
actor-managers continued the redistribution of Shakespeare’s cultural value when, on
their way to the Americas, they acted as representatives of European culture and origin
and, upon their return, they were nostalgically celebrated as a reminder of pre-1898
colonial vigour.
Starting from the adapted play-text’s inability to reproduce the ever-elusive
Shakespearean original, the performance of Shakespearean drama in the period is
surrounded by a number of anxieties that includes the Spanish actors’ shortcomings in
their comparison to the quality of Italian performance. Thus, the review of Zacconi’s
performance of The Shrew in 1903 included the following extract in defence of Spanish
Shakespearean acting:
I do not think it is necessary to harm our fellow countrymen to acknowledge Zacconi’s
unsurpassable artistic merit [...] It is true that we are short of eminent figures; but it would
be unfair to deny that there is around half a dozen actresses and actors on the Spanish stage
that do not belittle the credit of our theatrical flag abroad (Bueno 1903a: 1).
Here, ‘abroad’ means the former colonies. As the excerpt suggests, Spain’s cultural
inferiority complex within the European context which followed the Disaster of 98
could still be compensated for overseas. In that way, although political power over the
colonies had finally receded, Spain maintained cultural ties that mimicked former
supremacies. Being a pivotal nexus between Europe and Latin America, the Spanish
actor-managers provide evidence of Shakespeare’s shifting positions in its transcontinental circulation. The reviewer’s portrayal of Zacconi’s Othello as ‘filled with
actors and actresses’ who admittedly had ‘come to school’ evinced the imbalance
between the European touring actor and the local performer. In contrast, in his LatinAmerican tour of 1904, the Spanish actor-manager Emilio Thuillier had incorporated
some Mexican performers into his company. These actors did not take part in the
Shakespearean performances but when the Mexican Virginia Fábregas was asked at
Thuillier’s premiere of The Taming of the Shrew back in Madrid she answered: “We
have come to learn; just to learn” (Anon. 1904: 1). This shows Spain’s mobile position
within the cultural hierarchies of the period: the continental stars eclipsed Spanish
national talent when they went to perform in Madrid; in turn, the Spanish actormanagers, an ambivalent embodiment of prestigious European culture and of the former
coloniser, waved the flag of theatrical quality in Latin America.
11
In fact, part of the Spanish actor-managers’ status in Latin America was
constructed on their Shakespearean performances. Some Spanish actor-managers, like
Margarita Xirgu and Enrique Borrás, did more Shakespeare on their Latin American
tours than in their performances in Madrid. Thus, although Xirgu had been performing
in the capital since the 1910s, her female Hamlet of 1938, together with her productions
of Romeo and Juliet (1950), Macbeth (1954) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in
(1956), all belong to her American exile. Then, Borrás performed Othello in
Montevideo in 1911, and an unconfirmed Richard III was added to the repertoire of his
American tour next year.xii Then, Thuillier is reported to have performed Hamlet in
Cuba in 1903 (Anon. 1903: 2), and perhaps The Taming of the Shrew, which he used to
open his season in the Princesa on his return to Madrid. Hamlet is also associated with
the enviable reputation built by Tallaví in Latin America on his return to the Español in
1913 for, if Shakespeare helped the actor-managers capitalise on their European profile
in their American tours, on their return, the Spanish actors were celebrated as
international stars. Thus, the circularity of Shakespeare’s legitimising cultural value is
brought back to its origin in a review of Thuillier’s Othello: “The American journals
were filled with praise when the Spanish actor performed Shakespeare’s play in foreign
lands” (Anon. 1905: 2). Then, with the painful Disaster of 98 still fresh in people’s
memories, Shakespearean overseas success could readily transform into a nostalgic
healing process:
[Thuillier] has shown the New World that, in Spain, the performing arts are not in the state
of decay suggested by some of our Jeremiahs [...] It raises the spirits and uplifts the heart to
read in the Spanish Republics of America the praise dedicated to our artists (Z[EDA]
1904a: 1).
More extensive work could be done in this direction. Apart from Spain, for
example, the Italian stars, too, travelled to Latin America in the name of Europe, and the
link between Portugal and Brazil is also highly under-researched,xiii so I am only
hopeful that others will help illuminate these and other aspects of Shakespeare’s
reception. While this happens, an anecdote will help close this necessarily unfinished
discussion.
Margarita Xirgu, perhaps the most celebrated Spanish actress in the period,
never performed a Shakespeare play in Spain. Her title-role performance of Hamlet was
delivered in Argentina in 1938 while the Civil War continued in her home country, to
which she would never return. However, there is some evidence that Xirgu might have
been considering staging Shakespeare’s play as soon as 1933, according to one of her
biographers. In the summer of 1933, Margarita Xirgu and Jacinto Benavente, one of the
most successful playwrights of the time, visited Stratford-upon-Avon, where they had
the opportunity to attend the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. At the time, director
William Bridges-Adams was in charge of the Stratford Festival,xiv yet it seems to have
been after attending a student’s production of Hamlet that Xirgu sought Benavente’s
advice on whether she should dare do her own impersonation of the Prince: “You
should dare!”, Benavente said, “for [b]etter or for worse, performing Hamlet will
always honour an actor or an actress” (Guansé 1963: 74). ‘For better or for worse’,
regardless of the result, what mattered according to Benavente is the ‘honour’
accumulated in the Shakespearean role. Regardless of language too; after all, Sarah
Bernhardt had triumphed by performing the same role in a foreign tongue. Certainly,
prestige, that evasive, incorporeal entity, was at the centre of early twentieth-century
Shakespearean performance in Madrid.
12
And not only prestige but status, its hierarchical variant, for Shakespeare’s plays
on the Spanish-speaking stage proved to be measured one against another in what can
be understood as a transaction or, in the ambivalent case of the Spanish actor-manager,
an exchange of (inter)cultural value. In this way, the Shakespeare circuit of Spanishspeaking early twentieth-century performance can be thought about in its strict electrical
sense. Like electricity, Shakespeare travelled the Madrid stage through a potential
difference in cultural status where — be it through the highly acclaimed performances
of the prestigious Continental stars, or as an export to Latin America that helped
Spanish actors charge the batteries of their reputation on their return to Madrid —
Shakespeare’s cultural currency fluctuated according to the cultural balances put into
contact in each local scenario. Of course, the metaphor only goes so far, as
Shakespeare’s Spanish-speaking presence is not that of a closed circuit but of an
asymmetric circulation characterised, until very recently, by its erratic and inconstant
intensity.
13
For Shakespeare’s presence in Catalan culture see Buffery 2007 and SHAKREP, the Shakespearean
performances in Spain database (www.um.es). ‘Shakespeare as cultural catalyst’ was the theme of the
2010 International Shakespeare Conference at Stratford-upon-Avon and will be the topic of Shakespeare
Survey 64.
ii
See Gregor (1998) for an example of some the latest Spanish Shakespearemania, and Gregor (2010) for
a complete history of Shakespearean performance in Spain since 1772 to the present.
iii
Although Bernice Kliman and Rick Santos published Latin American Shakespeares in 2005, work on
Shakespeare’s reception in Central and South-America is still very much needed.
iv
Starting with the first written reference to Shakespeare in Spanish (Mariano Nipho in 1764), which
already relates the English playwright with early modern Spanish drama, examples can be found in
Pujante and Campillo 2007.
v
For a comprehensive list of Shakespeare translations in Spanish, see Laura Campillo’s database
(SH·ES·TRA) at www.um.es/shakespeare.
vi
In addition to the nineteenth-century built Madrid theatres, like the Real, Español, Princesa, or
Zarzuela, to name but a few of the most iconic, theatrical expansion continued with the construction of
the Reina Victoria, (1915), Odeón (1917, later called Calderón), La Latina (1919), Real Cinema (1920),
Alcázar (1922), Monumental (1922), Pavón (1925) and Fontalba (1925), some of which would eventually
share the space, sometimes as part of the same event, with cinema (Oliva 2004: 22; Ruesga 1999: 247250).
vii
The standard procedure for a theatre in Madrid during the period was to offer two performances of the
same or of two different plays. Still, theatres like the Cervantes, specialising in short musical events,
offered up to six shows a day, closing at midnight or later (Dougherty and Vilches 1990: 18).
viii
Reviews of Francisco Morano’s Sylok, el judio can be found in De Laserna 1923: 3, Díez-Canedo
1923: 2, Fernández Almagro 1923: 1, Marín Alcalde 1923: 5, Marquina 1923: 5. The five productions of
Othello were staged by, again, Francisco Morano (1904), Emilio Thuillier (1905), José Tallaví (1915),
Emiliano Latorre (1927), and Enrique Borras, who led the all-star production of 1936 that included the
also renowned Ricardo Calvo and Emilio Thuillier. Productions of Hamlet were staged by Francisco
Fuentes (1903), Emilio Thuillier (1904), José Tallaví, who performed it twice (1913 and 1916), Ricardo
Calvo, who produced the play in at least five different seasons (1917, 1923, 1928, 1930 and 1931), and
Juan Santacana (1928). The Taming of the Shrew was a frequent choice in Emilio Thuillier’s repertoire
(1895, 1897, 1899, 1900, 1904 and 1907) and Francisco Morano’s (1915, 1919, 1920, 1929). Actormanager Emilio Portes also performed the play in 1920 and 1921, there was an amateur production by the
ensemble La farándula (1910), and theatre director Gregorio Martínez Sierra staged the play in the first
season of his art theatre project Teatro de Arte (1918) at the Teatro Eslava. My data should not be taken
as conclusive, for I could have missed a production here and there in my search of newspaper databases,
although my records have been crossed with Dougherty and Vilches’ exhaustive catalogue of
performances in Madrid from 1918 to 1931 (see Dougherty and Vilches 1990 and 1997).
ix
In fifty pages, the author discusses Hamlet performances by Garrick, Kean, Macready, Irving, Wilson
Barrett, Benson and Beerbohm Tree.
x
The anonymous reviewer suggests that the actor-manager Thuillier was not familiar with Shakespeare
performances in English. Then, both Bueno and Machado claimed to have seen Irving perform (in the
case of Bueno, in the United States).
xi
Not all foreign actors affected Spanish performance with the same intensity. Thus, the French MounetSully’s Hamlet was met with audience applause yet negative reviews in 1904, and the Italian Garavaglia
provoked mixed responses in 1911 with his King Lear, a play that, like the Romeo and Juliet stagings by
Tina de Lorenzo in 1906 and 1909, was never assimilated by the Spanish Shakespearean repertoire in
Madrid. Then, Sarah Bernhardt’s success was unanimous and she would continue to be remembered in
the press for decades, yet her influence on the Spanish actor-managers was arguably limited by her
idiosyncratic approach to the play and her unsustained presence in Madrid’s theatrical circles, to which
she would not return to perform Shakespearean drama after her Hamlet of 1899. Yet, Ermete Novelli’s
return to Madrid in 1910 after his Shakespeare stagings of the late nineteenth century, and Ermete
Zacconi’s visits in 1901, 1903, 1913 and 1923 promoted the influence of the two Italian actors on their
Spanish colleagues.
xii
According to the newspaper ABC, Borrás prepared a tour that included Richard III and Othello (Anon.
1912: 8; for the performances in Uruguay and the provinces, see Anon. 1911: 2 and Anon. 1914: 4).
xiii
Preliminary work in this direction can be found in Kliman and Santos (2005).
xiv
Bridget-Adams’ 1933 Hamlet premiered in late September so, most likely, Xirgu attended The Taming
of the Shrew and/or Romeo and Juliet (see Kemp and Trewin 1953: 168-171; Mullin and Muriello 1980:
127, 430-431, 466-467).
i
14
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17