character-creation. In fact, so
potent is the influence of the actor upon the dramatist that the latter, in
creating character, goes to work very differently from his literary
fellow-artists,--the novelist, the story-writer, or the poet. Great
characters in non-dramatic fiction have often resulted from abstract
imagining, without direct reference to any actual person: Don Quixote, Tito
Melema, Leatherstocking, sprang full-grown from their creators' minds and
struck the world as strange and new. But the greatest characters in the
drama have almost always taken on the physical, and to a great extent the
mental, characteristics of certain great actors for whom they have been
fashioned. Cyrano is not merely Cyrano, but also Coquelin; Mascarille is
not merely Mascarille, but also Moliere; Hamlet is not merely Hamlet, but
also Richard Burbage. Closet-students of the plays of Sophocles may miss a
point or two if they fail to consider that the dramatist prepared the part
of Oedipus in three successive dramas for a certain star-performer on the
stage of Dionysus. The greatest dramatists have built their plays not so
much for reading in the closet as for immediate presentation on the stage;
they have grown to greatness only after having achieved an initial success
that has given them the freedom of the theatre; and their conceptions of
character have therefore crystallised around the actors that they have
found waiting to present their parts. A novelist may conceive his heroine
freely as being tall or short, frail or firmly built; but if a dramatist is
making a play for an actress like Maude Adams, an airy, slight physique is
imposed upon his heroine in advance.

Shakespeare was, among other things, the director of the Lord Chamberlain's
men, who performed in the Globe, upon the Bankside; and his plays are
replete with evidences of the influence upon him of the actors whom he had
in charge. It is patent, for example, that the same comedian must have
created Launce in _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ and Launcelot Gobbo in the
_Merchant of Venice_; the low comic hit of one production was bodily
repeated in the next. It is almost as obvious that the parts of Mercutio
and Gratiano must have been intrusted to the same performer; both
characters seem made to fit the same histrionic temperament. If Hamlet were
the hero of a novel, we should all, I think, conceive of him as slender,
and the author would agree with us; yet, in the last scene of