In a sense, his entire career and passion revolved around the principle that the rest of the world’s ideas about the proper way to present Shakespeare were absurd and that what society found strange and pointless was the proper way things should be done (Speaight 45).
Poel's Critics
His radical ideas occasionally made him the subject of jokes. When Poel cast a 17 -ear-old in the role of Juliet for his 1905 production of Romeo and Juliet because she was closer to the age called for in the text than the usual adult actresses that played the part, the critic of The Stage joked that Juliet really should have been played by a 14 year-old in order to be truly accurate (The Stage 14).
Observers occasionally saw Poel’s experiments of transforming a proscenium arch into an Elizabethan platform stage as not achieving the desired effect of presenting the play as the Elizabethans would have seen it, but rather presenting a picture of what the Elizabethans would have seen (Speaight 97). Theatre critic William Archer’s comments on the production of Twelfth Night sums up his general opinions on most of Poel’s endeavours, stating that it was:
"…staged (more or less) after the manner of the 16th century and acted after the manner of the 19th century amateur. The true end to be aimed at is to make Shakespeare, and some twelve or fifteen plays of his contemporaries, really live for the modern playgoer; and this end can never be attained by a form of representation which appeals only to the dilettante and the enthusiast" (Speaight 103).
Praise for Poel
Despite Archer’s protestations against the usefulness and success of Poel’s experiments, the pervading opinion of his colleagues and his posterity of scholars and practitioners points to the invaluable contribution that the actor-manager made to the theatre. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was a great admirer of Poel, in a letter written to him on 8 June 1896, expressed that “I am sure the only thing for Shakespeare critics is to go back to the Globe and Fortune and understand them” (Speaight 113).
Even George Bernard Shaw, notoriously ornery and difficult to please, wrote: "The more I see of these performances by the Elizabethan Stage Society, the more I am convinced that their method of presenting an Elizabethan play is not only the right method of that particular sort of play, but that any play performed on a platform amidst the audience gets closer home to its hearers than when it is presented as a picture framed by a proscenium" (The Saturday Review, 11 July 1896).
His Lasting Influence
The ability to produce a great effect on the audience through simple means of presentation, allowing the text to work on the spectators, and their close proximity to the performers on a thrust stage would prove to have a lasting effect on the theatre community. These basic principles, along with a stress on the importance of continuity of action, became the benchmarks of Poel’s teachings (Speaight 273).
The thought of producing a Shakespeare play in one of the old acting versions or revisions popular in the Victorian period is absurd today. Shaw’s praise of Poel in that Saturday Review article of 1896 continued, and included a very accurate prediction for Poel’s influence on future generations, for his “artistic rather than… literal presentation of Elizabethan conditions, the result being, as always happens in such cases, that the picture of the past was really a picture of the future” (Speaight 117).
Sources
- Speaight, Robert. William Poel and the Elizabethan Revival. Society for Theatre Research Annual Publications Series. 1954.
