Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 21, 1896 - Miscellanies, Volume IV

CRITICISMS
I fear she has not metal for what she tried last week.
Not to succeed in the sleep-walking scene is to make
a memorable failure. As it was given, it succeeded
in being wrong in art without being true to nature.
And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy
to reform, which somewhat interfered with the
success of the performance. At the end of the in-
cantation scene the Italian translator has made
Macbeth fall insensible upon the stage. This is
a change of questionable propriety from a psycho-
logical point of view ; while in point of view of
effect it leaves the stage for some moments empty
of all business. To remedy this, a bevy of green
ballet-girls came forth and pointed their toes about
the prostrate king. A dance of High Church
curates, or a hornpipe by Mr. T. P. Cooke, would
not be more out of the key ; though the gravity of
a Scots audience was not to be overcome, and they
merely expressed their disapprobation by a round of
moderate hisses, a similar irruption of Christmas
fairies would most likely convulse a London theatre
from pit to gallery with inextinguishable laughter.
It is, I am told, the Italian tradition ; but it is one
more honoured in the breach than the observance.
With the total disappearance of these damsels, with
a stronger Lady Macbeth, and, if possible, with some
compression of those scenes in which Salvini does
not appear, and the spectator is left at the mercy
of Macduffs and Duncans, the play would go twice
as well, and we should be better able to follow
and enjoy an admirable work of dramatic art.
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