Playwrights
do not write for ideal actors when their livelihood is at stake:
if they did, they would write parts for heroes with twenty arms
like an Indian god. Indeed the actor often influences the author
too much; for I can remember a time(I am not implying that it is
yet wholly past) when the art of writing a fashionable play had
become very largely the art of writing it "round" the
personalities of a group of fashionable performers of whom
Burbage would certainly have said that their parts needed no
acting. Everything has its abuse as well as its use.
It is also to be considered that great plays live longer than
great actors, though little plays do not live nearly so long as
the worst of their exponents. The consequence is that the great
actor, instead of putting pressure on contemporary authors to
supply him with heroic parts, falls back on the Shakespearean
repertory, and takes what he needs from a dead hand. In the
nineteenth century, the careers of Kean, Macready, Barry
Sullivan, and Irving, ought to have produced a group of heroic
plays comparable in intensity to those of Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides; but nothing of the kind happened: these actors
played the works of dead authors, or, very occasionally, of live
poets who were hardly regular professional playwrights.
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