Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 20 Read Online Free

(Gloucester: Cape Ann Advertiser Office, 1885), p. 36 md
passim.
    [27.] Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on
the American Stage from the Hallams to Edwin Booth (Washington: Folger
Shakespeare Library, 1976), p. 114.
     
                 The
great British actor David Garrick succeeded in reducing Shakespeare’s Taming
of the Shrew to a three-act farce called Katharine and Petruchio, which was performed from time to time at the Boston Theatre . [ 28] Since the author of “The Rival Prima Donnas” had a pass to the Boston, she
might well have enjoyed Garrick’s adaptation of Shakespeare upon several
occasions and been moved to write her own modern version. This she did in “d
arning a Tartar,” the “wild Russian story” she contributed to Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper. Her Russian melodrama is a well-paced, neatly
plotted story of the power struggle between the defiant, fearless, freedom-
loving Sybil Varna and the Slavic autocrat Prince Alexis Demidoff, whose Tartar
blood has made him a tyrant. Step by step, in bout after bout, her Petruchio
succumbs to her Katharine, feminism rises victorious, and where William
Shakespeare tamed a shrew, Miss Alcott tames a Tartar.
                 It
is, however, in the story Louisa Alcott contributed to the first issue of Frank
Leslie's Chimney Corner that her devotion to the theater and her
preoccupation with Shakespeare are crystallized. “A Double Tragedy” is
precisely what its subtitle indicates: “An Actor’s Story.” [29] Phis,
the shortest of the narratives in A Double Life , is quintessential^ a
story of the stage. It opens with a performance by the tw o protagonists —
loyers in life as well as on the stage — in “a Spanish play” whose cast
includes a lover disguised as a monk, a Grand Inquisitor, and a stern old duke
and whose plot involves a state secret, a duel, and long immurement in a
dungeon. What Spanish play had Alcott in mind? Her Spanish play seems to have
derived more from her own early dramatic effort performed in the Concord barn and entitled “The Captive of Castile”
than from any extant professional drama. During the nightmares that accompanied
her illness after serving at the Union Hotel Hospital , Alcott had had visions of a “stout,
handsome Spaniard” who pursued her, “appearing out of closets, in at windows,
or threatening me dreadfully all night long.” [30] Perhaps the shade
of that Spaniard was upon her.
     
    [28.] Ibid., p. xi. See also, for the
performances of the time and Alcott s addiction to the theater, Cheney, p. 65;
Madeleine B. Stern, "Louisa Alcott, Trouper," New England Quarterly
16:2 (June 1943): 188; Stern, Louisa May Alcott, p. 78; Eugene Tompkins, The
History of the Boston Theatre 1834-1901 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908).
    [29.] "A Double Tragedy. An Actors
Story," Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner 3 June 1865 ), 1-3.
    [30.] Louisa May Alcott, unpublished
journals (by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University ), [January] 1863, and
Cheney, pp. 146-147.
     
                 Whatever
sources may have contributed to the Spanish play that opens “A Double Tragedy,”
there is no doubt about the play that shaped its architecture. The sudden
reappearance of her husband, St. John , so maddens the actress Clotilde Varian,
who is in love with the actor Paul Lamar, that she murders her spouse. When
Paul becomes aware of her guilt, he finds her abhorrent: “What devil devised
and helped you execute a crime like this?” Following the murder, the two enact
the only tragedy possible under the circumstances: Romeo and Juliet. On
the night of the performance, Clotilde performs Juliet to the life and kills
herself on stage. Paul Lamar never acts again.
                 When
Louisa Alcott was given a free pass to the Boston Theatre, she was also
conducted by the manager all over the building on Boston ’s Washington Street . She was shown how a dancing floor could be
fitted over the