The elder Dumas, who wrote many successful plays, as well as the
famous romances, said that all he needed for constructing a drama
was "four boards, two actors, and a passion." What he meant by
passion has been defined by a later French writer, Ferdinand
Brunetière, as a conflict of wills. The Philosopher of Butterbiggens,
whom you will meet early in this book, points out that "what you
are all the time wanting" is "your own way." When two strong
desires conflict and we wonder which is coming out ahead, we say
that the situation is dramatic. This clash is clearly defined in
any effective play, from the crude melodrama in which the forces
are hero and villain with pistols, to such subtle conflicts,
based on a man's misunderstanding of even his own motives and
purposes, as in Mr. Middleton's "Tides."
In comedy, and even in farce, struggle is clearly present. Here
our sympathy is with people who engage in a not impossible
combat--against rather obvious villains who can be unmasked, or
against such public opinion or popular conventions as can be
overset. The hold of an absurd bit of gossip upon stupid people
is firm enough in "Spreading the News"; but fortunately it must
yield to facts at last. The Queen and the Knave of Hearts are
sufficiently clever, with the aid of the superb cookery of the
Knave's wife, to do away with an ancient and solemnly reverenced
law of Pompdebile's court. So, too, the force of ancient loyalty
and enthusiasm almost works a miracle in the invalid veteran of
"Gettysburg." And we feel sure that the uncanny powers of the
Beggar will be no less successful in overturning the power of the
King in Mr. Parkhurst's play.
Again, in comedies as in mathematics, the problem is often solved
by substitution. The soldier in Mr. Galsworthy's "The Sun" is
able to find a satisfactory and apparently happy ending without
achieving what he originally set out to gain. And the same is
true of Jock in Mr. Brighouse's "Lonesome-Like." Or the play
which does not end as the chief character wishes may still prove
not too serious because, as in "Fame and the Poet," the situation
is merely inconvenient and absurd rather than tragic. Now and
then it is next to impossible to tell whether the ending is
tragic or not; in the "Land of Heart's Desire" we must first
decide whether our sympathies are more with Shawn Bruin and with
Maire's love for him, or with her keen desire to go
To where the woods, the stars, and the white streams
Are holding a continual festival.
It is natural for us to desire a happy ending in stories, as we
desire satisfying solutions of the problems in our own lives. And
whenever the forces at work are such as make it true and possible,
naturally this is the best ending for a story or a play. But where
powerful and terrible influences have to be combated, only a poor
dramatist will make use of mere chance, or compel his characters
to do what such people really would not do, to bring about a
factitious "happy ending." With the relentless, mighty arms of
England engaged in hunting the defeated Highlanders after the
Battle of Culloden, a play like "Campbell of Kilmhor," in which we
sympathize with the ill-fated Stewarts, cannot end happily. If
they had yielded under pressure and betrayed their comrades, we
might have pitied them, but we could not admire their action, and
there would have been no strong conclusion. In "Riders to the
Sea," where the characters are compelled by bitter poverty to face
the relentless forces of storm and sea, and in "The Biding to
Lithend," we expect a tragic end almost from the first lines of
the play. We recognize this same dramatic tensity of hopeless
conflict in many stories as well as plays; it is most powerful in
three or four novels by George Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas
Hardy.
One of the best ways to understand these as real stage plays is
through some sort of dramatization. This does not mean, however,
that they need be produced with elaborate scenery and costumes,
memorizing, and rehearsal; often the best understanding may be
secured by quite informal reading in the class, with perhaps a hat
and cloak and a lath sword or two for properties. With simply a
clear space in the classroom for a stage, you and your
imaginations can give all the performance necessary for realizing
these plays very well indeed. But, of course, you must clearly
understand the lines and the play as a whole before you try to
take a part, so that you can read simply and naturally, as you
think the people in the story probably spoke. Some questions for
discussion in the appendix may help you in talking the plays over
in class or in reading them for yourself before you try to take a
part. You will find it sometimes helps, also, to make a diagram or
a colored sketch of the scene as the author describes it, or even
a small model of the stage for a "dramatic museum" for your
school. If you have not tried this, you do not know how much it
helps in seeing plays of other times, like Shakespeare's or
Molière's; and it is useful also for modern dramas. Such small
stages can be used for puppet theatres as well. "The Knave of
Hearts" is intended as a marionette play, and other
dramas--Maeterlinck's and even Shakespeare's--have been given in
this way with very interesting effects.
If you bring these plays to a performance for others outside your
own class, you will find that the simplest and least pretentious
settings are generally most effective. The Irish players, as Mr.
Yeats tells us, "have made scenery, indeed, but scenery that is
little more than a suggestion--a pattern with recurring boughs and
leaves of gold for a wood, a great green curtain, with a red
stencil upon it to carry the eye upward, for a palace." Mr. John
Merrill of the Francis Parker School describes the quite excellent
results secured with a dark curtain in a semicircle--a
cyclorama--for background, and with colored lights.[1] Such a
staging leaves the attention free to follow the lines, and the
imagination to picture whatever the play suggests as the place of
the action.
[Footnote 1: John Merrill: "Drama and the School," in _Drama_,
November, 1919.]