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 viii | Contents

Appendix A: Going a Step Further 277

Appendix B: Some Additional Explanations 281

Glossary of Statistical Terms 287

Credits 293
References 297
Index 299

901207_00_FM.indd 8 12/11/14 12:09 PM

 Detailed Contents

Preface xiv
Acknowledgements xvi

PART I DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS FOR ONE VARIABLE 1

Chapter 1 Levels of Measurement 2

Learning Objectives 2
The Stevens Classification 2
Nominal Measures 3
Ordinal Measures 4
Interval Measures 5
Ratio Measures 5
Dichotomies 5
Treating Ordinal Variables as Interval 7
Two Related Classifications 10
Graphing 11
Summary 13
Review Questions on Levels of Measurement 13
Notes 14

Chapter 2 Measures of Central Tendency 15

Learning Objectives 15
Definitions and Notation 16
Links to Levels of Measurement 16
Potentially Unstable Results 19
Instability of the Mode 19
Instability of the Median 19
Instability of the Mean 21
Measures of Central Tendency as Averages 22
Relations among the Mode, Median, and Mean 25
Summary 26
Review Questions on Central Tendency 26
Notes 27

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 x | Contents

Chapter 3 Measures of Dispersion 28

Learning Objectives 28
Measures for Nominal Variables 29
The Index of Diversity 29
The Index of Qualitative Variation 33
An Information Theoretic (Entropy) Measure of Dispersion 37
Quantile-Based Measures of Dispersion 40
An Alternative—The MAD 42
The Standard Deviation 43
Calculating a Standard Deviation 44
Instability of the Standard Deviation 45
The Standard Deviation with Ordinal Data 46
Standardizing Variables 47
The Standard Deviation and the Tails of a Distribution 47
The Special Case of the Dichotomy 49
Summary 51
Review Questions on Measures of Dispersion 52
Notes 53

Chapter 4 Describing the Shape of a Distribution 54

Learning Objectives 54
Modes 56
Skewness and Kurtosis 57
Formulae for Skewness and Kurtosis 63
Summary 67
Review Questions on Shapes of Distributions 67
Note 67

Chapter 5 Summarizing a Distribution 68

Learning Objectives 68
The Five-Number Summary 68
Graphing a Distribution 69
Boxplots 69
Pie Charts, Bar Charts, and Histograms 73
The Dot Chart 76
Smoothed Histograms 78
Back-to-Back Histograms 80

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 Contents | xi

The Population Pyramid 80

Cumulative Distributions 82
Creating a Mean and Standard Deviation Table 83
Summary 85
Review Questions on Summarizing a Distribution 85

PART II Statistical Inference 87

Chapter 6 Sampling Distributions 88

Learning Objectives 88
The Normal Distribution 90
The Sampling Distribution of a Proportion 93
The t Distribution 94
The Sampling Distribution for the Mean When t Applies 96
The Chi-Square Distribution 97
Relations among the Normal, t, and Chi-Square Distributions 101
The Effect of Sample Size 101
Summary 102
Review Questions on Sampling Distributions 103
Notes 104

Chapter 7 The Standard Model of Statistical Inference 105

Learning Objectives 105
Central Ideas 105
Tests with Chi-Square 108
Statistical Power 110
Confidence Intervals 112
Summary 114
Review Questions on the Standard Model of Statistical Inference 114
Note 114

Chapter 8 The Bayesian Alternative 115

Learning Objectives 115
Frequentist and Personal Probabilities 117
Bayes’ Theorem 119
Estimating a Proportion 121
Effects of Priors and Sample Data 123

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 xii | Contents

Credible Intervals 124

Numerical Equivalence to Standard Results 125
Summary 126
Review Questions on the Bayesian Alternative 126
Note 126

PART III Measures of Association 127

Association and Independence 127

Chapter 9 Measures for Nominal and Ordinal Variables 129

Learning Objectives 129
pre Measures 129
Lambda 130
Gamma 133
Somers’ d 137
Calculating Gamma and d for Tables Larger than 2 × 2 140
Yule’s Q as a Special Case of Gamma 143
The Odds Ratio 145
Q as a Function of the Odds Ratio 149
The Usefulness of Q with Changing Marginals 149
Summary 152
Review Questions on Measures for Nominal and Ordinal Variables 152
Notes 154

Chapter 10 Pearson’s r 155

Learning Objectives 155
Explaining the Formula 155
Calculation 158
Interpretations of r 158
The Sampling Distribution of r 159
Spearman’s Rho 159
Phi 160
Correlation Matrices 160
Graphic Displays for Interval or Ratio Data 162
Summary 165
Review Questions on Pearson’s r 166
Note 166

901207_00_FM.indd 12 12/11/14 12:09 PM

 Contents | xiii

PART IV Examining Crosstabulations 167

Chapter 11 Two-Way Tables 168

Learning Objectives 168
Reading a Crosstabulation 168
Heavy and Light Cells 170
Standardized Residuals 171
Setting Up a Crosstabulation for Presentation 174
Further Graphic Methods of Clarifying a Crosstabulation 177
Summary 181
Review Questions on Heavy and Light Cells and Graphic Methods 181
Notes 182

Chapter 12 Conditional Tables 183

Learning Objectives 183
The Columbia Approach 183
Specification 184
Causal Chains 186
Spurious Association 188
Distortion 189
Conditional Probabilities 192
An Illustration with Polytomies 192
Summary 195
Review Questions on Conditional Tables 195
Note 195

PART V Regression 197

Chapter 13 Bivariate Regression 198

Learning Outcomes 198
Origins 198
The Principle of Least Squares 200
The Logic of the see 203
The Logic of r2 204
Relative Usefulness of the see and r2 206
The Form of the Equation 207
Interpreting b 208

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 xiv | Contents

Graphic Display for Bivariate Regression 210

Non-linear Trends 211
Truncation 211
Exponential Curves 212
More Than One Slope 214
Handling Nominal Polytomies 217
Quadratic Trends 219
Summary 221
Review Questions on Bivariate Regression 221
Notes 222

Chapter 14 Multiple Regression 223

Learning Objectives 223
Why Multiple Regression (mr)? 223
Obtaining b’s in Multiple Regression 225
Using Least Squares in Bivariate and Multiple Regression 226
Interpreting b’s in Multiple Regression 228
Getting the Right Variables into the Equation 229
Interpreting a Table of Regression Results 231
Interaction Terms 234
An Example with Two Dichotomies 237
Setting Up a Regression Table 239
Creating an Equation 241
Graphs Presenting Regression Results 242
The Special Case of Analysis of Variance (anova) 243
One-way anova 243
Two-way anova 244
Interactions 246
Analysis of Covariance 250
The F Distribution in Regression and anova 251
Summary 254
Review Questions on Multiple Regression and anova 254
Notes 256

Chapter 15 Path Analysis 257

Learning Objectives 257
A Famous Path Model 257
Setting Up Path Diagrams 259

901207_00_FM.indd 14 12/11/14 12:09 PM

 Contents | xv

Equations 259
Decomposing a Correlation 260
Steps in Decomposing a Correlation 261
A Further Example 262
Summary 264
Review Questions on Path Analysis 264
Note 265

Chapter 16 Logistic Regression 266

Learning Objectives 266
Why Logistic Regression? 266
Logits 267
Interpreting the b’s 268
Converting Odds to Probabilities 269
A Sample Logistic Regression Table 271
An Extension of the Logistic Model: Multinomial Regression 273
Summary 275
Review Questions on Logistic Regression 276
Note 276

Appendix A Going a Step Further 277

A1: Minimizing the Sum of Squared Deviations 277
A2: The Mean and Standard Deviation of Z–Scores 278
A3: The Standard Deviation of a Proportion 279

Appendix B Some Additional Explanations 281

B1: Basic Notes on Logarithms 281
B2: Obtaining Expected Values for Chi-Square 284
B3: Another Form of Bayesian Hypothesis Testing 286

Glossary of Statistical Terms 287

Credits 293
References 297
Index 299

901207_00_FM.indd 15 12/11/14 12:09 PM

 Preface

T his book stems from 19 years of teaching undergraduates in sociology. In my first year
of teaching I wrote material to supplement the text I was using. In my second I replaced
sections that students had trouble following. Encouraged by their response, I wrote mate-
rial to cover topics not treated in the text I had moved to. Six years ago I decided to teach
entirely from my own material. This has been revised into the volume you see. Apart from
material created in light of reviewers’ comments, everything been class tested, most of it at
least five times.
The book moves quickly over topics that are standard in a one-semester first course. On
these themes it provides only a review or a review with added sophistication. It then moves
to cover a range of material broader than that of texts often used with Canadian undergrad-
uates. This may be readily seen in the detailed Table of Contents. Notice, in particular, the
extended section on regression, the analytic strategy most common in the journals today.
Since a second course may vary to suit the research interests of a department, and log-
linear models are very important in some areas of sociology, a chapter on basic log-linear
modelling is available for download from the course website, along with other instructional
materials. In my experience, students can handle this chapter as well as other material in
the latter half of the book.
Although this book does not emphasize calculation, it does present numerous formulae.
When it does so, it always explains why the formula is what it is. For example, students have
often been asked to memorize the formula for a standard deviation, or of Pearson’s r, or to
do calculations based on these formulae, without knowing why they take the form they do. I
have included a rationale for each. In the explanations I have not used mathematics beyond
high school algebra, but where a bit of algebra could be helpful I have been happy to use it.
Broad coverage and detailed explanation can be combined in a text intended for a one-
semester course because of a conceptual approach, together with extensive use of graphics.
By a conceptual approach, I mean simply one focused on why we use particular statistics,
what they can tell us, how they can mislead us, and what to do to prevent being misled (or
misleading others). Within this framework, students may be asked to work out the values of
basic statistics, but primarily as an aid to conceptual understanding. Since computers now

901207_00_FM.indd 16 12/11/14 12:09 PM

 Preface | xvii

do almost all serious statistical calculation, both in academia and outside, we have reduced
reason to emphasize do-it-yourself calculation, and can therefore move students further in
their conceptual understanding.
This is made much easier by frequent use of graphics. In this respect, I have been much
influenced by graphic methods often used in the sub-discipline of statistical graphics. In
one case, that of the chapter on conditional tables, I can move through the material in less
than half the time I needed before adding graphs. Apart from its advantages in teaching,
graphical communication is common in the leading journals of sociology, in the business
world, in reporting research results to general audiences, and increasingly in the mass
media. Exposing students to a wide range of graphics is therefore of much more than
instructional advantage.
Each chapter concludes with a set of review questions. I have used many of these, or
variations on them, as short answer questions in examinations. If I present a question
containing data or statistics, the numbers are never those in the handbook, but if students
understand the answers to the review questions, and have not just tried to memorize right
answers, they have acquired the key knowledge I hope to pass on. If examinations take
another form, working out the answers to the review questions should provide excellent
study notes.
While I have made no compromises in content, apart from omitting material requiring
matrix algebra, I have aimed to keep the writing simple. Of course technical terms must
be used, but otherwise I have aimed at a level which university-bound students in the later
years of high school could readily handle.
In the interests of clear exposition, I have sometimes explained a point with an artificial
example, then moved to one based on real data. In other cases, real data has lent itself well to
purposes of exposition. In these cases I have often presented a second example, based on the
experience that a second example has helped students to feel secure in their understanding.
I have also been influenced by a student observation that, when studying, if a point is clear
from the first example the second can be skimmed, but if it is not clear from the first the
second can become crucial. Over 70% of the real examples come from Canadian data. On
the other hand I have taken examples from Belgium, England, Mexico, and the US where
these have seemed clearer, more memorable, or simply more likely to interest my students
than Canadian examples of which I am aware.
The book has been strengthened considerably by suggestions from reviewers, who
typically were in broad agreement on what could helpfully be done. On one point, though,
the best location for the chapters on statistical inference, they were divided. I have placed
these chapters in accordance with majority preference, after the material on describing a
single variable. However, having presented statistical inference at a later point in my own
classes, and understanding well the advantages of doing so, I will point out that if two small
sub-sections which rely on the idea of a sampling distribution are omitted or postponed,
or if students remember the most basic ideas about inference, then Part Two on statistical
inference can be moved without difficulty to after the section on measures of association.

901207_00_FM.indd 17 12/11/14 12:09 PM

 xviii | Preface

Having profited from numerous suggestions from reviewers of the initial draft, I look
forward to further suggestions from users of the book. Any received will be considered
carefully.

Acknowledgements
If authors mention only those closest to the creation of their books, acknowledgements
can be brief. If all those who directly or indirectly contributed are mentioned, the list can
scarcely be completed. I will not attempt such a list, but I must mention those to whom
most is owed.
I owe William and Rosalie Arnold a very great deal for encouraging their bookish son,
at a time and place in which bookishness was not greatly in fashion. I owe them a great deal
as well for taking out loans to put me through my first degree, at a time when student loans
were unavailable, so that I could graduate without my own debts.
At the University of Saskatchewan, I was introduced to sociology by a great teacher,
Edward Abramson, who encouraged me to take courses in both applied and theoretical
statistics through the Department of Mathematics. Neither he nor I, nor my teachers
Abraham Kaller and Nicholas Sklov could have known they were preparing me for much
of the work of my adult life.
At the Social Planning and Research Council in Hamilton, where I had been hired by Harry
Penny, soon to be the Director of the School of Social Work at McMaster, I was fortunate to be
principal investigator for three studies that resulted in book-length manuscripts, each based on
quantitative data. Reports from each were reviewed by an advisory committee of academics and
social service administrators. For most of my time there, the chair of the committee was Frank
Jones of the McMaster Sociology department, later to be a member of my doctoral committee.
Some examples in this text stem from work done at the Council.
Michael Wheeler, at that time in the School of Social Work at McMaster, and Doris
Guyatt, of the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, then provided the
opportunity to serve as principal investigator in what turned out to be a three-wave
longitudinal study of the experience of parents with custody of children after marital
separation. Some examples in the text stem from this work.
During my years in applied research I always enjoyed opportunities to teach. With
that in mind, I went to McMaster for doctoral work. There I had the opportunity to do a
specialized comprehensive in quantitative methods, which I chose, in part, to allow me to
make contributions to joint projects, from which I have since learned much. At McMaster
I also learned a great deal about how to teach statistics to students of sociology by watching
Alfred Hunter, Charles Jones, and Peter Pineo at work. Peter Pineo, my dissertation
supervisor, in his self-effacing way, was a model of careful analytic practice. No one’s work
was more certain to replicate well. The exposition of ANOAS models for my dissertation
helped to prepare me to write the chapter on log-linear modelling available from the
textbook website.

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 Preface | xix

At Queen’s I had the opportunity to teach methods and statistics at both the undergraduate
and the Master’s levels. After two years, though, my teaching had to be reduced because I
had become project methodologist for the evaluation of Better Beginnings, Better Futures,
a provincially sponsored program designed to improve the life chances of children and
families in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Numerous examples in this volume are based
on the Better Beginnings data set.
I am grateful to Vince Sacco for introducing me to the project, which, with its multi-site
longitudinal design, provided ongoing challenges. I am also grateful to the funders, Ray
Peters, Kelly Petrunka, and the other members of the project Core Team for providing a
context in which my role in a highly complex evaluation could be carried out.
Having moved to Windsor, I have had the opportunity teach statistics and/or methods
every year at the undergraduate level, and often at the M.A. or Ph.D. level. This experience
has helped greatly in thinking through what can and should be presented, and how, in a
textbook of the kind you have before you.
The final form of the manuscript owes a great deal to the staff of Oxford University
Press Canada.
Thank you to the reviewers of the draft manuscript: Tom Buchanan, Kenneth
MacKenzie, Jenny Godley, and those who chose to remain anonymous. Of course I must
accept responsibility for such failings as may remain.
S.D.G.
Robert Arnold,
September, 2014

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901207_00_FM.indd 20 12/11/14 12:09 PM
 Part I
Descriptive Statistics
for One Variable

D escriptive statistics for a single variable often provide key pieces of information. The
mid-term average gives an indication of how well a class is doing. Unemployment rates
provide an indication of where an economy is moving. Average incomes for immigrant
groups inform us about how well they are integrating into the Canadian economy.
Besides providing key information, descriptive statistics may tell us how far we can rely
on other data. Survey researchers report characteristics of their samples—age, sex, income,
and the like—so readers can decide whether the samples are biased. For studies of specific
populations, statistics may be needed to show that they have been reached. For example, I
once looked at contraceptive practices in low-income areas, and had to show that the people
interviewed were often of lower socio-economic status.
Descriptive statistics can also tell us what analyses can be done. If, for example, we want
to know how cultural or racial groups are faring in the economy, we have to see how many
cases we have from which groups. Or if we hypothesize that the effect of income on health
will be most pronounced at the lower extremes of income, we will need to see how many
cases we have there.
It is for good reason, then, that this text begins with descriptive statistics for single
variables. Since the ones we use depend heavily on levels of measurement, we shall begin
with them.

901207_01_Ch01.indd 1 12/11/14 6:54 AM

 1
Levels of Measurement

Learning Objectives
In this chapter, you will learn

• a widely known way of classifying variables, which helps us to

decide which statistics can be used with them;
• some limitations of this classification;
• two other common ways to classify variables; and
• typical ways of graphing for variables of specific types.

The Stevens Classification

The most widely used classification of levels of measurement is that proposed by Stevens
(1946). We shall see how he distinguished among four levels and look at some of their limit-
ations in practice. Two alternative classifications will be considered, and graphs appropriate
to the second of these will be illustrated.
For Stevens (1946), measurement requires
a) that we be able to categorize each observation, and
b) that we be able to place each in only one category.
For example, if we ask people their country of birth, we should be able to place each
person in a category: Canada, Italy, Somalia, and so on, and each person should fit in
only one category. To put the requirements a bit more technically, the categories must

901207_01_Ch01.indd 2 12/11/14 6:54 AM

 1 | Levels of Measurement | 3
be exhaustive (so all cases can be placed) and mutually exclusive (so no case can go into
more than one).
When these standards are met, measurement can take place at four levels:
nominal;
ordinal;
interval; and
ratio.

Nominal Measures
What distinguishes nominal measurement is that any numbers assigned to the categories
are arbitrary. We might set up a code scheme beginning with
1 - Canada;
2 - Italy; and
3 - Somalia,
but we could equally well have set it up as
1 - Somalia;
2 - Italy; and
3 - Canada.
In the social sciences we have many nominal measures, with numbers assigned arbi-
trarily. We very often see
1 - male; and
2 - female,
but we also often see
0 - male; and
1 - female.
Again, we may see main activity coded
1 - employment;
2 - seeking work;
3 - schooling;

901207_01_Ch01.indd 3 12/11/14 6:54 AM

 4 | Part I | Descriptive Statistics for One Variable
4 - homemaking;
5 - retirement; and
6 - other,
but the numbers could easily be switched around.
Because numbers are assigned arbitrarily in nominal measurement, it makes no sense
to do arithmetic with them.
Ordinal Measures
When we can meaningfully order, or rank, the categories, we can assign numbers reflecting
their order. Suppose we ask for responses to “I am enjoying my time at university.” Answers
can be put in an order reflecting degree of agreement—for example,
1 - strongly agree;
2 - agree;
3 - neutral;
4 - disagree; and
5 - strongly disagree.
The interval and ratio levels also require that categories be ordered. What distinguishes
the ordinal level is that we cannot readily say that the distance between any two categories
is the same as that between any two others. In the example, we cannot readily say whether
the difference between “strongly agree” and “agree” is the same as that between “neutral”
and “disagree” or between any other two adjacent categories.1
The same applies for many other sociological variables—for example, highest level of
formal education, which might be coded
0 - secondary incomplete;
1 - secondary complete;
2 - some post-secondary, no degree; and
3 - university degree(s).
Any category further along is more advanced than those before it, but the distances
among them are unclear.
Because we do not know the precise distance between categories, we are in an awkward
position to do arithmetic. With full certainty, we can only treat one category as above or
below another. However, as we shall see, those who believe that distances between categor-
ies are approximately the same often use addition and subtraction. Their reasons will be
illustrated after we look at Stevens’ other two levels of measurement.

901207_01_Ch01.indd 4 12/11/14 6:54 AM

 1 | Levels of Measurement | 5
Interval Measures
At the interval level, as in all successful measurement, categories are exhaustive and mutually
exclusive. As at the ordinal level, they are clearly ordered. In interval measurement, though,
the distance between adjacent categories is the same wherever we are along the scale. A
stock example is temperature. The distance between 5 degrees and 10 is the same as the
difference between 15 and 20.
Because the distances are precise, and adjacent categories are equidistant, we can do
addition and subtraction straightforwardly. If we take 10 degrees − 5 degrees = 5 degrees,
the result means the same as if we had taken 20 − 15.
We still have a problem with multiplication and division, though. If the temperature
were 5 degrees, and someone suggested that at 10 degrees it would be twice as warm, we
would be puzzled by the claim. The reason is that an interval measure lacks a meaningful
0. The mere existence of the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales, with their differing 0 points,
underscores the reality that 0 does not represent the full absence of temperature. That being
so, it makes no sense to say that 10 degrees is twice as hot as 5, or half as hot as 20.
Ratio Measures
As at the earlier levels, categories are exhaustive and mutually exclusive. As at the ordinal
and interval levels, categories are ordered, and as was true at the interval, adjacent cat-
egories are equidistant. The distinctive feature of the ratio level is a meaningful zero point.
Examples include population counts, grades on examinations, incomes, and years of age or
of education completed.
Because there is a meaningful zero, not only addition and subtraction, but also multipli-
cation and division make sense. If we multiply someone’s income by two, we get the income
of someone who, in these terms, is doing twice as well. If a mother is 52 and her daughter
26, it is meaningful to say the daughter is half her mother’s age.
Dichotomies
Dichotomies (variables which take on only two values) are a special case. They may be treated
as lying at any one of the four levels. Take, for example, a variable called UDEGREE, coded
0 = has no university degree; and
1 = has a degree.
If the order of the categories is of no concern—we just want to distinguish two groups—
there is no problem in treating this variable as nominal. It can also be seen as ordinal, since
having a degree means having more advanced education than being without one. Further,
since there is only one distance between categories, there need be no concern about whether
distances are constant, so this variable can be treated as interval without a problem. We can
also think of the first category as representing a meaningful zero: you have a degree or you
do not, so if sheer presence of the degree is what matters, the variable can be treated as ratio.

901207_01_Ch01.indd 5 12/11/14 6:54 AM

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 V
ON THE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING A PATTERN
 V
ON THE ADVANTAGE OF HAVING A PATTERN

No passage of Stevenson’s has been oftener quoted than his

confession how he taught himself the art of letters by playing “the
sedulous ape to many masters”; and in this avowal he had been
preceded by masters of style as dissimilar in their accomplishment
as Franklin and Newman. Stevenson may be overstating the case—
he had caught the trick of over-statement from Thoreau—but he is
not misstating it when he asserts that this is the only way to learn to
write. Certainly it is an excellent way, if we judge by its results in his
own case, in Franklin’s and in Newman’s. The method of imitative
emulation will help any apprentice of the craft to choose his words, to
arrange them in sentences and to build them up in coherent
paragraphs. It is a specific against that easy writing which is “cursed
hard reading.” But it goes no deeper than the skin, since it affords
insufficient support when the novice has to consider his structure as
a whole, the total form he will bestow upon his essay, his story, his
play.
In the choice of the proper framework for his conception the
author’s task is made measurably lighter if he can find a fit pattern
ready to his hand. Whether he shall happen upon this when he
needs it is a matter of chance, since it depends on what the
engineers call “the state of the art.” There have been story-tellers
and playwrights not a few who have gone astray and dissipated their
energies, not through any fault of their own, but solely because no
predecessor had devised a pattern suitable for their immediate
purpose. They have wandered afield because the trail had not been
blazed by earlier, and possibly less gifted, wayfarers and
adventurers.
Perhaps I can make clear what I mean by a concrete example not
taken from the art of letters. In Professor John C. Van Dyke’s acute
analysis of the traditions of American painting, he has told us that
when La Farge designed the ‘Ascension’ for the church of that name
in New York,

The architectural place for it was simplified by placing on the chancel wall of the
church a heavily gilded moulding, deep-niched, and with an arched top, which
acted at once both as a frame and a limit to the picture. The space was practically
that of a huge window with a square base and a half-top requiring for its filling two
groups of figures one above the other. La Farge placed his standing figures of the
apostles and the holy women in the lower space and their perpendicular lines
paralleled the uprights of the frame; at the top he placed an oval of angels about
the risen Christ, and again the rounded lines of the angel group repeated the
curves of the gilded arch.

Then Professor Van Dyke appends this significant comment:

There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly adopted from
Italian Renascence painting and had been used for high altar-pieces by all the
later painters—Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, Titian, Palma. They had worked out the
best way of filling that up-right-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the
tradition because he recognized its sufficiency.

In other words, the art of painting had so far advanced that La

Farge was supplied with the pattern best suited to his purpose; and
this pattern once accepted, he was at liberty to paint the picture as
he saw it, without wasting time in quest of another construction. The
picture he put within that frame was his and his only, even if the
pattern of it had been devised centuries before he was born. In thus
utilizing a framework invented by his predecessors he was not
cramped and confined; rather was he set free. So it is that to Milton
and to Wordsworth the rigidity of the sonnet was not a hindrance but
a help—especially to Wordsworth since it curbed his tendency to
diffuseness. Wordsworth himself declared his delight in the
restrictions of the sonnet:
In truth the prison into which we doom
 Ourselves no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be),
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace here, as I have found.
That utterance of Wordsworth’s may be recommended to the
ardent advocates of Free Verse,—that is, of the verse which boasts
itself to be patternless and to come into being in response solely to
the whim of the moment. Sooner or later the Free Versifiers will
discover the inexorable truth in Huxley’s saying that it is when a man
can do as he pleases that his trouble begins.
Since I have ventured these three quotations I am emboldened to
make a fourth—from John Morley’s essay on Macaulay. After
informing us about the rules which Comte imposed on himself in
composition, Morley tells us that Comte

justified his literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart and
intelligence of submission to artificial restrictions. He felt, after he had once
mastered the habit of the new yoke, that it became the source of continual and
unforeseeable improvement even in thought, and he perceived that the reason
why verse is a higher kind of literary perfection than prose, is that verse imposes a
greater number of rigorous forms.

It is because of their rigorous forms that the ballade and the

rondeau have established themselves by the side of the sonnet; and
the lyrist who has learnt to love them finds in their fixity no curb on
his power of self-expression. So in the kindred art of music, the
sonata and the symphony are forms each with a law of its own; yet
the composer has abundant liberty within the law. He has all the
freedom that is good for him; and the prison to which he dooms
himself no prison is.

II

There is however a difference between a fixed form, such as the

sonata has and the sonnet, and the more flexible formula, such as
the arrangement within a framework which La Farge borrowed from
the painters of the Italian Renascence. A pattern of this latter sort is
less rigid; in fact, it is easily varied as successive artists modify it to
suit themselves.
Consider the eighteenth century essay which Steele devised with
the aid of hints he found in the ‘Epistles’ and even in the ‘Satires’ of
Horace, and which was enriched and amplified by Addison. The
pattern of the ‘Tatler’ and the ‘Spectator’ was taken over by a
heterogeny of other essayists in the course of four-score years,
notably by Johnson in the ‘Idler’ and the ‘Rambler’; and assuredly
Johnson if left to himself could never have invented a formula so
simple, so unpretending and so graceful. It was only a little departed
from by Goldsmith, and only a little more by Irving in the ‘Sketch-
Book,’ which is not so much a periodical (altho it was originally
published in parts) as it is a portfolio of essays and of essay-like
tales. From Irving, Thackeray borrowed more than the title of his
‘Paris Sketch-Book’ and ‘Irish Sketch-Book.’
Consider the earlier and in some measure stricter form of the
essay as it had been developed by Montaigne,—the pattern that
Montaigne worked out as he put more and more of himself into the
successive editions of his essays. He had begun intending little more
than a commonplace-book of anecdotes and quotations; and yet by
incessant interpolation and elaboration his book became at last the
intimate revelation of his own pungent individuality. This is the
pattern that Bacon adopted and adapted to his purpose, less
discursive and more monitory, but not less pregnant nor less
significant. And it is Montaigne’s formula, not greatly transformed by
Bacon, which Emerson found ready to his hand when he made his
essays out of his lectures, scattering his pearls of wisdom with a
lavish hand and not pausing to string them into a necklace. We
cannot doubt that the pattern of Montaigne and Bacon and Emerson
owed something also to their memory of Epictetus and Marcus
Aurelius.
Shakspere was as fortunate as Bacon in the fact that he had not to
waste time in vainly seeking new forms. He did not invent the sonnet
and he did not invent the sonnet-sequence; but he made his profit
out of them. Neither the stanza nor the structure of his two narrative
poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and the ‘Rape of Lucrece,’ was of his
contriving; he found them already in use and he did not go in search
of any overt novelty of form.
Scott, “beaten out of poetry by Byron,” as he himself phrased it,
turned to prose-fiction; and almost by accident he created the pattern
of the historical novel, with its romantic heroes and heroines and with
its realistic humbler characters. His earliest heroes and heroines in
prose were very like his still earlier heroes and heroines in verse;
and his realistic characters were the result of his expressed desire to
do for the Scottish peasant what Miss Edgeworth had done for the
Irish peasant. The first eight of the Waverley novels dealt only with
Scottish scenes; then in ‘Ivanhoe,’ and a little later in ‘Quentin
Durward,’ Scott enlarged his formula for the presentation of an
English and a French theme.
Since Scott’s day his pattern has approved itself to three
generations of novelists; and it is not yet outworn. In France Victor
Hugo and Alexander Dumas accepted it, each of them altering it at
will, feeling free to adjust it to their own differing necessities. In Italy it
was employed by Manzoni, in Poland by Sinckiewitz; and in
Germany by a horde of uninspired story-tellers. In the United States
it was at once borrowed by Cooper for the ‘Spy,’ the first American
historical novel. Then Cooper, having proved its value, took the
pattern which Scott had created for the telling of a story the action of
which took place on land, and in the ‘Pilot’ made it serve for a story
the action of which took place mainly on the sea,—perhaps a more
striking originality than his contemporaneous employment of it for a
series of tales the action of which took place in the forest.
It is one of the most fortunate coincidences in the history of
literature that Scott crossed the border and made a foray into English
history at the very moment when Cooper was ready to write fiction
about his own country; and it was almost equally unfortunate that
Charles Brockden Brown was born too early to be able to avail
himself of the pattern Scott and Cooper were to handle triumphantly.
Brown died a score of years before the publication of ‘Ivanhoe.’ He
left half-a-dozen novels of varying value, known only to devoted
students of American fiction. He had great gifts; he had invention
and imagination; he was a keen observer of human nature; he had a
rich faculty of description. (In one of his books there is a portrayal of
an epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia which almost challenges
comparison with De Foe’s ‘Journal of the Plague Year’.) But “the
state of the art” of fiction supplied Brown with no model appropriate
to his endowment; and therefore he had to do the best he could with
the unworthy pattern of the Gothic Romance of Horace Walpole and
Mrs. Radcliffe and of their belated followers, “Monk” Lewis and
Godwin. If Brown had been a contemporary of Cooper, then the
author of the ‘Last of the Mohicans’ might have had a worthy rival in
his own country.
The state of the art in his own time was a detriment to a far greater
story-teller than Brown or Cooper or Scott, to one of the greatest of
all story-tellers, to Cervantes. ‘Don Quixote’ abides as the
imperishable monument to his genius, to his wisdom, to his insight,
to his humor, to his all-embracing sympathy. None the less is it
sprawling in its construction and careless in its composition. There
were only two models available for Cervantes when he wrote this
masterpiece of fiction, the Romance of Chivalry and its antithesis,
the Romance of Roguery—the picaresque tale. The Romance of
Chivalry was generally chaotic and involute, with a plot at once
complicated and repetitious. The Romance of Roguery, born of an
inevitable reaction against the highflown and toplofty unreality of the
interminable narratives of knight-errantry, was quite as straggling in
its episodes; and it was also addicted to cruel and brutal practical
joking. For Cervantes these were unworthy patterns; and he had no
other. So it is that the method of ‘Don Quixote’ is sometimes
unsatisfactory, even when the manner is always beyond all cavil.
Moreover, it is evident that Cervantes builded better than he knew;
he seems not to have suspected the transcendent quality of his own
work; and therefore he did not take his task as seriously as he might.
As it has been well said, Cervantes came too early to profit by
Cervantes.
How much luckier are the novelists and short-story writers of to-
day! The state of the art has advanced to a point unforeseen even a
century ago. Whatever theme a writer of fiction may want to treat
now, he is never at a loss for a pattern, which will preserve him from
the misadventure which befell Cervantes. In its methods, if in nothing
else, fiction is a finer art than it was once upon a time. Consider
Rudyard Kipling, for example, who is almost infinitely various, and
who is always inexpugnably original. Whatever his subject might be,
there was always an appropriate pattern at his service; he had only
to pick and choose that which best suited his immediate need.
Consider Stevenson, again, and how he was able to play the
sedulous ape at one time to Scott and Dumas, and at another to
Hawthorne and Poe.

III

It is perhaps in the field of playmaking that the utility of the pattern

is most obvious. Sophocles modeled himself on Aeschylus, and then
modified the formula in his own favor. Calderon took over the pattern
that Lope de Vega had developed and the younger playwright
departed from it only infrequently. Racine modeled himself upon
Corneille; and then transformed the formula he borrowed in
obedience to his own genius. Victor Hugo took the theatrically
effective (but psychologically empty) pattern of contemporary
Parisian melodrama and draped its bare bones with his glittering
lyrism. Maeterlinck took the traditional formula of the fairy-play, the
féerie, and endowed it with the poetic feeling which delights us in the
‘Blue Bird.’ Oscar Wilde took the framework of Scribe and Sardou;
and he was thus enabled adroitly to complicate the situations of
‘Lady Windermere’s Fan.’
Then there is Ibsen, whose skilful construction has demanded the
praise of all students of the art and mystery of playmaking. He
started where Scribe and Sardou left off. The earliest of his social
dramas, the ‘League of Youth,’ is in accord with the pattern of Augier
and the younger Dumas. The next, the ‘Doll’s House,’ might have
been composed by Sardou—up to the moment in the final act when
husband and wife sit down on opposite sides of the table to talk out
their future relation. Thereafter Ibsen evolved from this French
pattern a pattern of his own which was exactly suited to his later
social dramas and which has in its turn been helpful to the more
serious dramatists of to-day.
As Shakspere had been content to take the verse-forms of his
predecessors and contemporaries, so he never hesitated to employ
their playmaking formulas. Kyd had developed the type of play which
we call the tragedy-of-blood; and Shakspere borrowed it for his ‘Titus
Andronicus’ (if this is his, which is more than doubtful) and even for
his ‘Hamlet,’ wherein it is purged of most of its violence. Marlowe
lifted into literature the unliterary and loosely knit chronicle-play; and
Shakspere enlarged this formula in ‘Richard III’ and ‘Richard II.’ It
was in his youth that Shakspere trod in the trail of Kyd and Marlowe;
and in his maturity he followed in the footsteps of his younger
friends, Beaumont and Fletcher, taking the pattern of their dramatic-
romance for his ‘Winter’s Tale’ and ‘Cymbeline.’ Due perhaps to the
fact that the state of the art did not provide him with a pattern for
what has been called high-comedy, Shakspere did not attempt any
searching study of Elizabethan society,—altho, of course, this may
have been because Elizabethan society was lacking in the delicate
refinements of fashion which are the fit background of high-comedy.
Whatever the explanation may be, it was left for Molière, inspired
by the external elegancies of the court of Louis XIV, to create the
pattern of high-comedy in ‘Tartuffe’ and the ‘Misanthrope’ and the
‘Femmes Savantes,’—the pattern which was to serve Congreve for
the ‘Way of the World,’ Sheridan for the ‘School for Scandal,’ Augier
and Sandeau for the ‘Gendre de Monsieur Poirier.’ And Molière
really created the formula, with little or no help from any earlier
dramatists, either Greek or Latin. Neither in Athens nor in Rome was
there the atmosphere of breeding which might have stimulated
Menander or Terence to the composition of comedies of this
distinction. It is the more remarkable that Molière should have
accomplished this feat, since he sought no originality of form in his
earlier efforts, contenting himself with the loose and liberal
framework of the Italian improvized plays, the Comedy-of-Masks.
One of the many reasons for the sterility of the English drama in
the middle of the nineteenth century is that the dramatists of our
language seem to have believed it their duty to abide by the patterns
which had been acceptable to the Jacobean and Restoration
audiences and which were not appropriate to the theater of the
nineteenth century, widely different in its size and in its scenic
appliances. The English poets apparently despised the stage of their
own time; and they made no effort to master its methods. As a result
they wrote dramatic poems and not poetic dramas. They did not
follow the example of Victor Hugo and lift into literature a type of play
which was unliterary. Stevenson, in his unfortunate adventures into
playmaking, made the unpardonable mistake of trying to varnish with
style a dramatic formula which had long ceased to be popular.
In the past half-century the men of letters of our language have
seen a great light. They have no contempt for the dramatic patterns
of approved popularity; and of these there are now a great many,
suitable for every purpose and adjustable to every need. They have
found out how to be theatrically effective without ceasing to be
literary in the best sense of the word,—that is to say, they are not
relying on “fine writing” but on clear thinking and on the honest
presentation of human nature, as they severally see it.
(1921)
 VI
DID SHAKSPERE WRITE PLAYS TO FIT HIS ACTORS?
 VI
DID SHAKSPERE WRITE PLAYS TO FIT HIS
ACTORS?

In his consideration of the organization of the Elizabethan dramatic

companies Professor Alwin Thaler pointed out that the company of
the Globe Theater in London, to which Shakspere belonged,
continued to contain the same actors year after year, the secessions
and the accessions being few and far between; and he explained
that this was “because its members were bound to one another by
ties of devoted personal friendship.” He noted that he had
“emphasized the influence exerted upon Shakspere the playwright
by his intimate knowledge of the men for whom his work was written,
and there can be no doubt that in working out some of his greatest
characters he must have remembered that Burbage was to act
them.” Then Professor Thaler filed a caveat, so to speak.

But the Shakspere muse was not of that sorry sort which produces made-to-
order garments to fit the tastes and idiosyncrasies of a single star. Far from being
one-man plays, the dramas were written for a great company of actors.... And
Richard Burbage, I imagine, would have had little inclination to surrender his place
among his peers for the artificial and idolatrous solitude of modern starhood.

In this last sentence Mr. Thaler confuses the issue. The question is
not whether Burbage wanted to go starring, supported by a more or
less incompetent company, but whether Shakspere did on occasion
choose to write a play which is in fact a made-to-order garment to fit
the idiosyncrasies of a single star. And when it is put in this way the
question is easy to answer. We know that Burbage played Richard
III, and if there ever was a star-part, if there ever was a one-man
play, if there ever was a piece cut and stitched to the measure of the
man who first performed it, then it is Richard III. Here we have a
dominating character to whom the other characters are sacrificed; he
is etched with bold strokes, whereas most of the others are only
faintly outlined. So long as Richard is powerfully seized and
rendered, then the rest of the acting is relatively unimportant.
Richard is the whole show. And while there is only a single star-part
in Richard III—Eclipse first and the rest nowhere—there are twin
star-parts in Macbeth, who are vigorously drawn, while the remaining
characters are merely brushed in, as Professor Bradley has noted.
Now, if this proves that Shakspere’s muse was of a sorry sort, then
that heavenly visitor is in no worse case than the muse of many
another dramatist. Sophocles is reported to have devised his great
tragic parts specially for one actor, whose name has not come down
to us. Racine wrote ‘Phèdre’ and ‘Andromaque,’ his masterpieces,
for Mlle. de Champsmeslé. Rostand wrote ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ and
‘Chantecler’ for Coquelin. Sardou wrote ‘Fédora’ and ‘Théodora’ for
Sarah Bernhardt. The younger Dumas wrote the ‘Visite de Noces’ for
Desclée. Giacommetti wrote ‘Maria Antoinette’ for Ristori and the
‘Morte Civile’ for Salvini. D’Annunzio wrote the ‘Gioconda’ and the
‘Citta Morte’ for Duse. Bulwer-Lytton wrote the ‘Lady of Lyons’ and
‘Richelieu’ for Macready. Gilbert wrote ‘Comedy and Tragedy’ for
Mary Anderson. Legouvé has told us in detail the circumstances
which led to his writing (in collaboration with Scribe) ‘Adrienne
Lecouvreur’ for Rachel. Jules Lemaître has told us how and why he
came to compose his ‘Age Difficile’ for Coquelin; and Augustus
Thomas has told us how he came to compose his ‘In Mizzoura’ for
Goodwin. The line stretches out to the crack of doom. When
Shakspere chose to produce made-to-order garments to fit the
idiosyncrasies of a single actor, he was in very good company,
ancient and modern. And we may go further and assert that very few
of these plays are any the worse because they were made-to-order.
The great dramatists, whose works we analyze reverently in the
study, were all of them, in their own time, successful playwrights,
stimulated now and again by association with the most gifted and the
most accomplished of contemporary actors. If they had not made
their profit out of the histrionic ability of the foremost performers of
their own time and country, they would have been neglecting golden
opportunities.
Those who best know the conditions of playwriting will be the least
likely to deny that not a few of the great characters in the drama
came into being originally as parts for great actors. Of course, these
characters are more than parts; they transcend the endowment of
any one performer; they have complexity and variety; they are vital
and accusable human beings; but they were parts first of all more or
less made-to-order. In many cases we know the name of the actor
for whose performance the character was conceived, Burbage for
one, Mlle. de Champsmeslé for a second, Coquelin for a third. And
in many another case we lack definite knowledge and are left to
conjecture. There are peculiarities in the ‘Medea’ of Euripides, for
instance, which seem to me to point to the probability that it also was
a made-to-order garment.
To say that Sophocles and Euripides possibly did this cutting-to-fit,
that Shakspere and Racine and Rostand indisputably did it, is not to
imply that they did it always or even that they did it often. Perhaps
they did it more often than we shall ever know; perhaps they had
special actors in mind when they created characters which are not
star-parts. And this suggests a broadening of the inquiry.

II

After asserting that Shakspere’s were “far from being one-man

plays,” Professor Thaler reminded us that Shakspere’s dramas were
written “for a great company of actors”; and what is true of
Shakspere

holds good also of the Elizabethan drama in general. Its breadth and variety may
be ascribed in no slight degree to the fact that the organization of the dramatic
companies provided the great poets of a great age with ample facilities for the
interpretation of many characters and many phases of life.
 This prompts a question as to whether Shakspere may not have
fitted other actors who were his associates at the Globe Theater
besides Burbage. That he did deliberately and repeatedly take the
measure of the foremost performer in the company and that his
dramatic genius was stimulated by the histrionic talent of Burbage, I
do not doubt. We cannot help seeing that Shakspere’s heroes
become older as Burbage himself advanced in years. Romeo being
intended for a fiery young fellow and Lear being composed for a
maturer man, who had become a more consummate artist. I have
suggested elsewhere the possibility—to my own mind a probability—
that Shakspere inserted the part of Jaques into ‘As You Like It’
specially for Burbage. Shakspere took his sequence of incidents
from Lodge’s ‘Rosalynd,’ in which there is no character which
resembles Jaques; and Jaques has nothing to do with the plot; he
remains totally outside the story; he exists for his own sake; and he
may very well have been thrust into ‘As You Like It’ because
Burbage was too important an actor to be left out of the cast and
because Orlando was not the kind of part in which Burbage at that
period of his artistic development would appear to best advantage.
If Shakspere made parts thus adjusted to the chief performer at
the Globe Theater, may he not also have proportioned other and less
important characters to the capabilities of one or another of the
actors whose histrionic endowment he was in the best possible
position to appreciate aptly, since he was acting every day by their
side? Is this something to which the greatest of dramatists would
scorn to descend? Has this ever been done by any other playwright
in all the long history of the stage?
When we turn the pages of that history in search of support for this
suggestion, we find it abundantly and super-abundantly. The
succession of comic operas which Gilbert devised to be set to music
by Sullivan reveal at once that they were contrived with reference to
the capacity and to the characteristics of the chief members of the
company at the Savoy Theater. The sequence of broadly humorous
pieces, farces which almost rose to be comedies and comedies
which almost relaxed into farces, written by Labiche, and by Meilhac
and Halévy for the Palais Royal theater were all of them so put
together as to provide appropriate parts for the quartet of comedians
who made that little house the home of perennial laughter in the third
quarter of the nineteenth century.
At the same time Meilhac and Halévy were contriving for the
Variétés the librettos of ‘Barbe-Bleue’ and the ‘Grande Duchesse de
Gérolstein,’ ‘Belle Hélène’ and ‘La Périchole,’ a series of opera-
bouffes enhanced by the scintillating rhythms of Offenbach and
adroitly adapted to the special talents of Schneider, of Dupuis and of
several of the other more or less permanent members of the
company. Almost simultaneously Augier and the younger Dumas
were giving to the Comédie-Française their social dramas, always
carefully made-to-order to suit the half-dozen leading members of
the brilliant company Perrin was then guiding. The ‘Fourchambault’
of Augier and the ‘Étrangère’ of Dumas are masterpieces of this
profitable utilization of the pronounced personalities of the
performers. The ‘Étrangère,’ in particular, would have been a very
different play if it had not contained characters made-to-order for
Sarah Bernhardt and Croizette, Got and Coquelin.
A little earlier the series of blank verse plays written by Gilbert for
the Haymarket Theater, of which ‘Pygmalion and Galatea’ won the
most protracted popularity, had their leading characters plainly
made-to-order for Mr. and Mrs. Kendal and for Buckstone himself.
And just as ‘Richard III’ and ‘King Lear’ are none the worse because
the central character was conceived also as an acting part for
Burbage, so Gilbert’s blank verse pieces, Augier’s social dramas,
Meilhac and Halévy’s farcical comedies lost nothing by their owing
some portion of their inspiration to the necessity of fitting the
accomplished comedians by whom the outstanding characters were
to be impersonated. I venture to express the opinion that this desire
to bring out the best the several actors had to give was helpful rather
than not, stimulatingly suggestive to the author when he was setting
his invention to work.
When we turn back the pages of stage-history from the nineteenth
century to the eighteenth we find perhaps the most striking of all
instances of made-to-order parts,—an instance which shows us not
one or two or three characters in a play, but almost every one of
them, composed and elaborated with an eye single to the original
performers. The ‘School for Scandal’ has been seen by hundreds
and read by thousands, who have enjoyed its effective situations, its
sparkling dialog and its contrasted characters, without any suspicion
that the persons of the play were made-to-order parts. Yet this
undisputed masterpiece of English comedy is what it is because its
clever author had succeeded to the management of Drury Lane,
where Garrick had gathered an incomparable company of
comedians; and in writing the ‘School for Scandal’ Sheridan peopled
his play with the characters which the members of this company
could personate most effectively.
King was Sir Peter, Mrs. Abington was Lady Teazle, Palmer was
Joseph Surface, Smith was Charles Surface; and they were so
perfectly fitted that they played with effortless ease. So closely did
Sheridan identify the parts with the performers that when a friend
asked him why he had written a five-act comedy ending in the
marriage of Charles and Maria without any love-scene for this
couple, he is reported to have responded: “But I couldn’t do it. Smith
can’t make love—and nobody would want to make love to Priscilla
Hopkins!”

III

It may be objected that Sheridan and Augier and Dumas were

after all dextrous playwrights and that they are no one of them to be
ranked with the truly great dramatists. While they might very well be
willing once in a way to turn themselves into dramaturgic tailors, this
is a servile complaisance of which the mighty masters of the drama
would never be guilty, from which indeed they would shrink with
abhorrence. But if we turn the pages of stage-history still further
back, from the eighteenth century to the seventeenth, we discover
that Molière did this very thing, the adjustment of a whole play to the
actors who were to perform it, not once as Sheridan did, but
repeatedly and regularly and in all his pieces, in his loftiest comedies
no less than his broadest and most boisterous farces. And there will
be found few competent critics to deny that Molière is one of the
supreme leaders of the drama, with an indisputable right to a place
by the side of Sophocles and Shakspere, even if he does not climb
to the austere and lofty heights of tragedy.
The more we know about the art of the theater and the more we
study the plays of Molière the more clearly do we perceive that he
was compelled to do persistently what Sheridan did only once. The
company at the Palais Royal was loyal to Molière; nearly all its
leading members came to Paris with him and remained with him until
his death fifteen years later. This company was strictly limited in
number; and as it had a permanent repertory and stood ready to
appear in any of its more successful plays at a moment’s notice,
outside actors could not be engaged for any special part,—even if
there had then been in Paris any available performers at liberty.
Molière could not have more parts in any of his pieces than there
were members of the company; and he could not put into any of his
pieces any character for which there was not a competent performer
in the company. No doubt, he must at times have felt this to be a
grievous limitation. That he never deals with maternal love may be
accounted for by the fact that he had no woman to play agreeable
“old women,”—the disagreeable elderly females being still played by
men, in accord with the medieval tradition. We know the name of the
male actor who appeared as Madame Pernelle in ‘Tartuffe,’ as the
wife in the ‘Bourgeois Gentilhomme’ and as the Comtesse
d’Escarbagnas.
Molière wrote many parts for his own acting; and as he was
troubled with a frequent cough, he sometimes makes coughing a
characteristic of the person he was to act. His brother-in-law, Béjart,
was lame; and so Molière describes a character written for this actor
as having a limp. His sister-in-law, Madeleine Béjart, was an actress
of authority; and so the serving maids he wrote for her are
domineering and provocative. But when she died and her place was
taken by a younger actress with an infectious laugh, the serving
maids in all the plays that Molière wrote thereafter are not
authoritative, and they are given occasion for repeated cachinnation.
And as this recruit, Mlle. Beauval, had a clever little daughter,
Molière did not hesitate to compose a part for a child in his ‘Malade
Imaginaire.’ When we have familiarized ourselves with the record of
the leading man, La Grange, of Madeleine Béjart, of Catherine de
Brie, and of Armande Béjart (Molière’s wife), we find it difficult to
study the swift succession of comedies without constantly feeling the
presence of the actors inside the characters written for them. We
recognize that it was not a matter of choice this fitting of the parts to
the performers; it was a matter of necessity; and even if it may have
irked him at times, Molière made the best of it and probably found
his profit in it.
Now Shakspere was subject to the same limitations as Molière. He
composed all his plays for one company, the membership of which
was fairly constant during a score of years and more. It was also a
repertory company with frequent changes of bill. It could never be
strengthened by the special engagement of an unattached
performer; it had to suffice, such as it was. So far as we can judge by
the scant external evidence and by the abundant internal evidence of
the plays written for them by Shakspere, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and
Fletcher, and the rest, the company was composed of unusually
competent performers. It is unthinkable that Shakspere should have
plotted his superb series of tragedies, making more and more
exacting demands on the impersonators of his tragic heroes, unless
he had a confident assurance that Burbage would be equal to them.
And this confidence could not fail to be a stimulus to him,
encouraging him to seek out stories for the ample display of his
friend’s great gifts.
From all we have learnt of late about Shakspere we are justified in
believing that he was a shrewd man of affairs with a keen eye to the
main chance. He was a sharer in the takings at the door; and he
could not but know that those plays are most attractive to the public
which contain the most parts demanding and rewarding good acting.
So we must infer that he put into his plays the characters in which he
judged that his comrades could appear to best advantage. He not
only wrote good parts for good actors, he wrote special parts for
special actors, shaping his characters to the performers who were to
impersonate them. In other words he provided, and he had to
provide, made-to-order garments.
 That he did this repeatedly and regularly, just as Molière was to do
it three-quarters of a century later on the other side of the channel, is
plainly evident, altho we do not now know the special qualifications
of his actors as well as we do those of Molière’s. But we cannot
doubt that the company contained one actor of villains, of “heavies”
as they are termed in the theater. I hazard a guess that this was
Condell, afterwards the associate of Heming in getting out the First
Folio; but whoever he was, Condell or another, he was entrusted
with Iago, with Edmund in ‘King Lear,’ with the King in ‘Hamlet,’ and
with the rest of Shakspere’s bold, bad men.
We know that there were two low comedians in the company, who
appeared as the two Dromios, as the two Gobbos, as Launce and
Speed; and we know also that one of these was Will Kempe and that
when he left the Globe Theater his place was taken by Arnim. Now,
we can see that the Dromios, the Gobbos, Launce and Speed are
merely “clowns” as the Elizabethans called the funny men,—“Let not
your clowns speak more than is set down for them.” The Dromios
and the Gobbos and the corresponding parts in Shakspere’s earlier
plays, including Peter in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ are only funny men, with
little individuality, almost characterless; and we may surmise that this
was due to Shakspere’s own inexperience in the delineation of
humorous character. But we may, if we choose, credit it also to the
fact that Kempe was only a funny man, and not a character-actor.
And we can find support for this in the superior richness and stricter
veracity of the low comedy characters composed by Shakspere after
Arnim took Kempe’s place,—Dogberry, the porter in ‘Macbeth,’ the
gravedigger in ‘Hamlet,’ comic parts which are also characters,
equipt with more or less philosophy. And again this may be ascribed
either to Shakspere’s own ripening as a humorist or to the richer
capacity of Arnim. But why may not these two causes have
coöperated?
Then there is the brilliant series of parts composed for a dashing
young comedian,—Mercutio, Gratiano, Cassio, Laertes. That these
successive characters were all entrusted to the same performer
seems to me beyond question; and it seems to me equally
indisputable that Shakspere knew what he was doing when he