LAPSUS LINGUAE ON THE STAGE

BY THORNTON GRAVES

One of the most striking arguments, perhaps, for innate human impoliteness is the delight of the average person at the linguistic mishaps of his fellow mortals. In street-corner conversation, in the class-room, even in polite society, the unfortunate tripping of a tongue is followed by an outburst more or less hilarious; and when the excited or over-hasty actor on the stage indulges in a violent mispronunciation or any transposition of words or sounds, he provides, not only unbounded amusement to the audience assembled, but a welcome morsel for newspaper gossip and the collectors of theatrical anecdotes. So prone has been the actor's tongue to boggle, and so startling is the result of such procedure that recent writers on dramatic technique have taken particular care to warn the prospective playwright against the composition of tricky or "untalkable" lines. In giving such advice they are, of course, doing no new thing. Text-books on style have always warned the writer against "phrases not to be articulated by the powers of men;" treatises on oratory and acting have emphasized the necessity of careful and distinct enunciation as a guard against unexpected laughter; actors have frequently protested against the necessity of having to pronounce "unpronounceable phrases;" and compilers of stage jokes have given such ample space to the unforseen comedy which follows a tripping tongue that W. B. Wood, writing as early as 1846, declared that the "stories of actors' verbal blunders have become somewhat stale." In spite of this pronouncement a few incidents illustrating the danger an actor constantly faces may be brought together as a sort of supplement to the warnings which recent books administer against the writing of treacherous or "untalkable" passages. I say "few," because, as Walter Leman wrote nearly forty years

ago, “a list of misreadings and transpositions of words, perpetrated on the stage through inadvertence, momentary abstraction and other causes, would fill a volume." Some of the anecdotes which follow are hoary with age, a few have been blunted by constant usage, but most of them, in spite of antiquity or frequent repetition, are worth still another retelling.

Perhaps the most common type of linguistic blunder committed by actors is the transposition of words or letters as the result of haste or excitement. One of the best known instances of this sort of thing is Charles Kemble's conversion of Shakspere's "Shall I lay perjury upon my soul?" into "Shall I lay surgery upon my poll?" Almost as well known are Mrs. Davenport's statement, "I protest there's a candle coming along the gallery with a man in his hand," and Mrs. Gibbs's declaration while acting in The Clandestine Marriage that the servant Betty had locked the key and carried away the door in her pocket. Less often encountered is the anecdote of the actor who, while playing Stukeley to Fanny Kemble's Mrs. Beverley in Moore's The Gamester, amused the audience by his unusual transposition of the words in the act of villifying the wayward Beverley. "How injured? And who has injured me?" the lady asks; and Stukeley is expected to reply, "My friend your husband." Rather startling to Mrs. Beverley it must have been, when, instead of the usual words, he replied, "Your friend-my husband." Various jest-books state that Sir Edward Mortimer in Coleman's once famous drama The Iron Chest amazed his companion on the stage by saying, "You have noticed in my chest a library"-a shifting of words which especially delighted the audience when the actor thus addressed smiled visibly and Sir Edward followed up his blunder with the comment, "You see he changes at the word." Charles Matthews was fond of telling about a certain player who said "roaring with pain" when he should have said "pouring with rain;" and an old Portsmouth manager, says the actor

Denham, once electrified the audience by making Sir Abel Handy in Morton's Speed the Plough declare that he had obtained, not a "patent for converting sawdust into deal boards" the words of the author-but a "patent for converting deal boards into saw dust." Bernard in his Retrospections of the Stage records that an obscure eighteenth century actor once gave the audience a queer insight into his inner thoughts while playing Frederick in Mrs. Centlivre's The Wonder. "Fie, Don Felix," he was expected to say, "draw your naked sword upon a lady." Instead of which he exclaimed, "Fie, Don Felix, draw a naked lady upon your sword."

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The fact that American actors have made similar mistakes can be abundantly illustrated. Hamlet's mother as performed by an American lady once attempted to utter the awkward line, "Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light," the following result: "Nor earth to me give heaver.. nor food light." Again, Walter Leman declares that he heard an actor confirm a solemn truth with the words "There is not the sloughtest dite;" while James E. Murdock tells an interesting story of how an American audience cheered him when, after saying "eloquent fluence" for "fluent eloquence," he set his teeth, made a new start, and articulated the treacherous line with especial deliberateness and distinctness. Even the great Thomas A. Cooper did a worse thing while acting the title rôle in Sheridan Knowles' Virginius. It will be remembered that in the scene where the old Roman stabs his daughter to save her from the lust of Appius, he rushes out among the lictors and exclaims with an ostentatious flourish of the knife reddened with Virginia's blood:

"If they dare

To tempt the desperate weapon that is maddened

With drinking my daughter's blood, why let them. Thus

It rushes in amongst them."

But the solemnity of the occasion was completely destroyed

when the great tragedian concluded his threat with the words, "It mushes in arungst them." Slightly different from Cooper's confusion of sounds and certainly more startling was the Kansas amateur described in Milton Noble's Shop Talk. While the young aspirant for theatrical fame was impersonating Captain De Lascour in the very emotional drama, The Sea of Ice, he turned himself loose during the "grand scene" of the piece. As a climax to his speech to the mutineers the worthy captain is expected to cry: "Monster, take my life, but spare, O spare my wife and child!" But the captain, either as the result of too much excitement or of unfortunate memories of his domestic state, turned the melodrama into farce by exclaiming, "Monster, spare my life, but take, O, take my wife and child!"

Not quite so common as the type of verbal blunder just discussed is the substitution of certain sounds for similar ones in consequence of the unfortunate association of ideas. The stock example of this is the story of the actor in Richard III, who, instead of remarking to the tyrant bent on interfering with Henry's funeral, "Stand back, my lord, and let the coffin pass," actually presented his halberd and said to the villainous hunchback, "Stand back, my lord, and let the parson cough." Leathes in his An Actor Abroad writes that he had, himself, heard this ludicrous mistake on two occasions; and James E. Murdock in his interesting book, The Stage, tells the story of an actor who, on being told the anecdote, remarked that only an ass could make such a mistake. Certain fellow-players argued for the plausibility of the story, and in the course of the argument a bet was made that the sceptic himself would be guilty of the blunder during the very next performance of Richard III. He lost his bet.

Suspiciously ingenious is the dexterity ascribed to Higgins while playing in Othello at Philadelphia about 1830, a feat which converted the Duke's words, "Take up the tangled matter at the best" into the patriotic utterance, "Take up

the star-spangled in the West." Almost as auspicious is the story of the English provincial actor who substituted a has a for is the during the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, with the shocking result: "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet has a son." More convincing is the account in Ryley's Itinerant of Jonathan Davies' error while performing at Lime late in the eighteenth century. On acting the rôle of Sir Charles to the Lady Racket of a Miss Stanley in Three Weeks after Marriage, he was induced by that lady to co-operate in the introduction of her own composition. She insisted especially that in reply to her query following the first quarrel scene, "Won't you go to bed?" he should say, "No, madam, I'll never go to bed with a woman who does not know what's trumps." In his confusion, however, he delighted everybody except Miss Stanley by declining her invitation thus: "No, madam, I'll never go to bed with a woman that trumps."

In the majority of the cases above the confusion of the actor has been more or less justified in consequence of the dangerous or tricky nature of the text. The nature of the text, however, rarely accounts for another type of verbal blunder frequently heard on the stage-the simple substitution of one word for another. Sometimes this substitution has been due simply to carelessness; sometimes to indifference combined with ignorance. Of the latter type is apparently the performance of an early American actor named Seymour, who, while playing the part of a guard, announced at a critical moment: "I severed his head from his body, and in an obscure corner I disclosed it" (for "disposed it"). The same actor is credited with replying thus to Hotspur's impatient query regarding the delay of his ally:

There is more news,

I learned in Worcester as I rode along,

He cannot draw his power these fourteen years" (for “days”).

Here also probably belongs Benson Hill's account of the actress who made Joan of Arc in Tom Taylor's play