Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America by Beth Holmgren

Author:Beth Holmgren [Holmgren, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Drama, American, General, European
ISBN: 9780253356642
Google: xbs2mAEACAAJ
Amazon: 0253356644
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2011-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Modjeska as Rosalind in As You Like It at Booth’s Theatre, New York, 15 December 1882. Courtesy of the Warsaw Theatre Museum

One of the most articulate and ardent members of Modjeska’s audience was George C. D. Odell, who published his Annals of the New York Stage, a young man’s chronicle of theatergoing, after he became Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University. He attended Modjeska’s As You Like It at the Union Square Theatre on 25 October 1886:

I have the most vivid memory of Modjeska’s Rosalind.… This was one of the glories of the American theatre. What her Rosalind may have lacked in raillery and youthful buoyancy, it made up in gentle humour, grace, poetry, or even at times pensive charm … Modjeska easily transcended all phases of technical efficiency, of which, indeed, she was past mistress, and arrived into a realm of poetic and spiritual heredity that few have reached. And this in spite of her foreign accent which one must admit detracted from utter enjoyment of her Shakespearian imitations. Her Rosalind … was bewitching and exquisite as no other Rosalind in my experience has been.45

Ultimately, Modjeska’s much-praised and oft-performed interpretation qualified her as an authority on the part, a fact that Winter himself acknowledged in reviewing a January 1892 production of As You Like It. The aging critic had not changed his mind about this Rosalind’s strengths and weaknesses, but he now admitted how very well the non-English Modjeska felt and knew the role: “Mme. Modjeska’s fondness for the part and her deep sympathy with it are manifest in every act and word. No one understands it better, and no one, probably, could descant on it with more minute knowledge of its attributes and its drift.”46 Indeed, ten days after this review appeared, Modjeska showed just how ably she could “descant on it,” delivering a paper on the role of Rosalind before the Goethe Society of New York, a study she had composed two years before at Arden, her California version of Rosalind’s forest. In it, Modjeska sketched for her listeners how one can deduce Rosalind’s character quite readily from the cues in Shakespeare’s text, without recourse to Thomas Lodge’s novel Rosalynde on which the play was based. The lecturing actress detailed how she read, interpreted, and embodied her role, accenting always subtlety and refinement: “In studying the play one can easily see that the part of Rosalind has not been written for what we actors call ‘points,’ for effective entrances and exits, etc. It would be easy to produce a melodramatic effect in the scene with the Duke Frederick at the end of the first act, but it would be a great mistake. Rosalind is never loud.… Even in her indignation she is not disrespectful.”47 By explicating several key scenes and arguing how they must be played, Modjeska challenged her critics on their own turf, proving through analysis as well as action that her genteel Rosalind, dwelling in “an idyl and a poem more than a comedy,” is “the only Rosalind,” “the most ideal of all Rosalinds.

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