The American Stage of To-Day by Walter Prichard Eaton; Small, Maynard and Company, 1908

WITH all due respect and admiration for Miss Maude Adams, with all due respect and admiration for the drama "made in France" (a trade-mark supposed to carry all the weight of the English "sterling"), with all due -- well, with all due consideration of the applause bestowed upon play and players, it is impossible to take "The Jesters" very seriously. Putting aside for a moment the question of metrical form, the content and spirit of this play are spurious, and greatly to admire it, even greatly to derive pleasure from it, is to confuse the real with what is only imitation; to confuse, if not actually to debase, one's standards of taste and judgment; certainly to entangle one's merely friendly interest in the personality of Miss Adams with one's aesthetic appreciation of a work of art. Such a confusion of judgments is not, unfortunately, rare or difficult to fall into, and therein lies one of the greatest dangers of the "star" system. The apparently considerable public approval of "The Jesters" is an excellent case in point.

long ago Maude Adams played "Twelfth Night" at Harvard University on the bare stage of Sanders Theater, after what the Harvard English department supposed to have been the Elizabethan manner. To me there was something almost pathetic in thus stripping the play down to its essentials, for it emerged a fragile, child-figure, almost trivial in its puny prettiness. Scenes of roaring farce there were, such farce as only Shakespeare ever wrote, and the infinite grace of language, and that vivid life-likeness to the characters that is, after all, what makes Shakespeare supreme. But grace of language and vividness of character are qualities that may be found quite as well in the poem or the novel. What is essentially of the stage in the play, the unfolding of a story or the setting forth of an aspect of life in terms of living act and gesture, seemed suddenly not only trivial but absurd. This confusion of brother and sister, this pretty masquerade of Viola as a boy, so utterly impossible, so infantile and foolish, seemed in spite of the grace of its manner almost unworthy of serious attention. I caught myself looking with amazement at the men and women about me, so learned in literature, whose beaming smiles denoted complete satisfaction. Was something wrong with me, I wondered? Or was it that the stage in their lives occupies a much less important place than in mine, that their adult and deeper interests lie elsewhere, are otherwise satisfied, so that an evening in the theater is for them -- as for how many of us! -- a kind of lapse into make-believe land, into the easy faith and careless unreality of childhood? Should that be the attitude of all of us toward the theater, should we all be Elizabethans, grown-up, unreflecting children in the play-house, even to-day, putting aside our sense of reality, our deeper desires, when we enter its portals and ignoring what advance the drama has painfully won through successive generations? Judging not historically but absolutely, should we find "Twelfth Night" wholly great, wholly satisfying, should we fail to detect in its theatrical falsities and unreality signs of the childhood of the race?

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