his sovereign King Charles II. himself, was the first to set up the
standard of _heroic plays_.[211] This new species of tragedy (for such
it professed to be) commended itself by its novel choice of themes, to a
large extent supplied by recent French romance--the _romans de longue
haleine_ of the Scuderys and their contemporaries--and by French plays
treating similar themes. It likewise borrowed from France that garb of
rhyme which the English drama had so long abandoned, and which now
reappeared in the heroic couplet. But the themes which to readers of
novels might seem of their nature inexhaustible could not long suffice
to satisfy the more capricious appetite of theatrical audiences; and the
form, in the application which it was more or less sought to enforce for
it, was doomed to remain an exotic. In conjunction with his
brother-in-law Sir R. Howard,[212] and afterwards more confidently by
himself,[213] Dryden threw the incomparable vigour and brilliancy of his
genius into the scale, which soon rose to the full height of fashionable
popularity. At first he claimed for English tragedy the right to combine
her native inheritance of freedom with these valuable foreign
acquisitions.[214] Nor was he dismayed by the ridicule which the
celebrated burlesque (by the duke of Buckingham and others) of _The
Rehearsal_ (1671) cast upon heroic plays, without discriminating between
them and such other materials for ridicule as the contemporary drama
supplied to its facetious authors, but returned[215] to the defence of a
species which he was himself in the end to abandon.[216] The desire for
change proved stronger than the love of consistency--which in Dryden was
never more than theoretical. After summoning tragedy to rival the
freedom (without disdaining the machinery) of opera--with whose birth
its own revival was as a matter of fact simultaneous--he came to
recognize in characterization the truest secret of the master-spirit of
the Elizabethan drama,[217] and after audaciously, but in one instance
not altogether unhappily, essaying to rival Shakespeare on his own
ground,[218] produced under the influence of the same views at least one
work of striking merit.[219] But he was already growing weary of the
stage itself as well as of the rhymed heroic drama; and, though he put
an end to the species to which he had given temporary vitality, he
failed effectively to point the way to a more legitimate development of
English tragedy. Among the other tragic poets of this period, N. Lee, in
the outward form of his dramas, accommodated his practice to that of
Dryden, with whom he occasionally co-operated as a dramatist, and like
whom he allowed political partisanship to intrude upon the stage.[220]
His rhetorical genius was not devoid of genuine energy, nor is he to be
regarded as a mere imitator. T. Otway, the most gifted tragic poet of
the younger generation contemporary with Dryden, inherited something of
the spirit of the Elizabethan drama; he possessed a real gift of tragic
pathos and melting tenderness; but his genius had a worse alloy than
stageyness, and, though he was often happy in his novel choice of
themes, his most successful efforts fail to satisfy tests supplementary
to that of the stage.[221] Among dramatists who contributed to the vogue
of the "heroic" play may be mentioned J. Bankes, J. Weston, C. Hopkins,
E. Cooke, R. Gould, S. Pordage, T. Rymer and Elkanah Settle. The
productivity of J. Crowne (d. c. 1703)[222] covers part of the earlier
period as well as of the later, to which properly belong T. Southerne, a
writer gifted with much pathetic power, but probably chiefly indebted
for his long-lived popularity to his skill in the discovery of
"sensational" plots; and Lord Lansdowne ("Granville the polite") (c.
1667-1735). Congreve, by virtue of a single long celebrated but not
really remarkable tragedy,[223] and N. Rowe, may be further singled out
from the list of the tragic dramatists of this period, many of whom
were, like their comic contemporaries, mere translators or adapters from
the French. The tragedies of Rowe, whose direct services to the study of
Shakespeare deserve remembrance, indicate with singular distinctness the
transition from the fuller declamatory style of Dryden to the calmer and
thinner manner of Addison.[224] In tragedy (as to a more marked degree
in comedy) the excesses (both of style and subject) of the past period
of the English drama had produced an inevitable reaction; decorum was
asserting its claims on the stage as in society; and French tragedy had
set the example of sacrificing what passion--and what vigour--it
retained in favour of qualities more acceptable to the "reformed" court
of Louis XIV. Addison, in allowing his _Cato_ to take its chance upon
the stage, when a moment of political excitement (April 1713) ensured to
it an extraordinary success, to which no feature in it corresponds,
except an unusual number of lines predestined to become familiar
quotations, unconsciously sealed the doom of English national tragedy.
The "first reasonable English tragedy," as Voltaire called it, had been
produced, and the oscillations of the tragic drama of the Restoration
were at an end.
Comedy.
English comedy in this period displayed no similar desire to cut itself
off from the native soil, though it freely borrowed the materials for
its plots and many of its figures from Spanish, and afterwards more
generally from French, originals. The spirit of the old romantic comedy
had long since fled; the graceful artificialities of the pastoral drama,
even the light texture of the mask, ill suited the demands of an age
which made no secret to itself of the grossness of its sensuality. With
a few unimportant exceptions, such poetic elements as admitted of being
combined with the poetic drama were absorbed by the opera and the
ballet. No new species of the comic drama formed itself, though towards
the close of the period may be noticed the beginnings of modern English
farce. Political and religious partisanship, generally in accordance
with the dominant reaction against Puritanism, were allowed to find
expression in the directest and coarsest forms upon the stage, and to
hasten the necessity for a more systematic control than even the times
before the Revolution had found requisite. At the same time the
unblushing indecency which the Restoration had spread through court and
capital had established its dominion over the comic stage, corrupting
the manners, and with them the morals, of its dramatists, and forbidding
them, at the risk of seeming dull, to be anything but improper. Much of
this found its way even into the epilogues, which, together with the
prologues, proved so important an adjunct of the Restoration drama.
These influences determine the general character of what is with a more
than chronological meaning termed the comedy of the Restoration. In
construction, the national love of fulness and solidity of dramatic
treatment induced its authors to alter what they borrowed from foreign
sources, adding to complicated Spanish plots characters of native
English directness, and supplementing single French plots by the
addition of others.[225] At the same time, the higher efforts of French
comedy of character, as well as the refinement of expression in the list
of their models, notably in Moliere, were alike seasoned to suit the
coarser appetites and grosser palates of English patrons. The English
comic writers often succeeded in strengthening the borrowed texture of
their plays, but they never added comic humour without at the same time
adding coarseness of their own. Such were the productions of Sir George
Etheredge, Sir Charles Sedley, and the "mob of gentlemen who wrote with
ease"; nor was there any signal difference between their productions and
those of a playwright-actor such as J. Lacy (d. 1681), and a
professional dramatist of undoubted ability such as J. Crowne. Such,
though often displaying the brilliancy of a genius which even where it
sank could never wholly abandon its prerogative, were, it must be
confessed, the comedies of Dryden himself. On the other hand, the lowest
literary deeps of the Restoration drama were sounded by T. D'Urfey,
while of its moral degradation the "divine Astraea," the "unspeakable"
Mrs Aphra Behn, has an indefeasible title to be considered the most
faithful representative. T. Shadwell, fated, like the tragic poet
Elkanah Settle, to be chiefly remembered as a victim of Dryden's satire,
deserves more honourable mention. Like J. Wilson, whose plays seem to
class him with the pre-Restoration dramatists, Shadwell had caught
something not only of the art, but also of the spirit, of Ben Jonson;
but in most of his works he was, like the rest of his earlier
contemporaries, and like the brilliant group which succeeded them,
content to take his moral tone from the reckless society for which, or
in deference to the tastes of which, he wrote.[226] The absence of a
moral sense, which, together with a grossness of expression often
defying exaggeration, characterizes English comic dramatists from the
days of Dryden to those of Congreve, is the main cause of their failure
to satisfy the demands which are legitimately to be made upon their art.
They essayed to draw character as well as to paint manners, but they
rarely proved equal to the former and higher task; and, while choosing
the means which most readily commended their plays to the favour of
their immediate public, they achieved but little as interpreters of
those essential distinctions which their art is capable of
illustrating.[227] Within these limits, though occasionally passing
beyond them, and always with the same deference to the immoral tone
which seemed to have become an indispensable adjunct of the comic style,
even the greatest comic authors of this age moved. W. Wycherley was a
comic dramatist of real power, who drew his characters with vigour and
distinctness, and constructed his plots and chose his language with
natural ease. He lacks gaiety of spirit, and his wit is of a cynical
turn. But, while he ruthlessly uncloaks the vices of his age, his own
moral tone is affected by their influence in as marked a degree as that
of the most light-hearted of his contemporaries.[228] The most brilliant
of these was indisputably W. Congreve, who is not only one of the very
wittiest of English writers, but equally excels in the graceful ease of
his dialogue, and draws his characters and constructs his plots with the
same masterly skill. His chief fault as a dramatist is one of
excess--the brilliancy of the dialogue, whoever be the speaker,
overpowers the distinction between the "humours" of his personages.
Though he is less brutal in expression than "manly" Wycherley, and less
coarse than the lively Sir J. Vanbrugh, licentiousness in him as in them
corrupts the spirit of his comic art; but of his best though not most
successful play[229] it must be allowed that the issue of the main plot
is on the side of virtue. G. Farquhar, whose morality is on a par with
that of the other members of this group, is inferior to them in
brilliancy; but as pictures of manners in a wider sphere of life than
that which contemporary comedy usually chose to illustrate, two of his
plays deserve to be noticed, in which we already seem to be entering the
atmosphere of the 18th-century novel.[230] His influence upon Lessing is
a remarkable fact in the international history of dramatic literature.
Sentimental comedy.
The improvement which now begins to manifest itself in the moral tone
and spirit of English comedy is partly due to the reaction against the
reaction of the Restoration, partly to the punishment which the excesses
of the comic stage had brought upon it in the invective of Jeremy
Collier[231] (1698), of all the assaults the theatre in England has had
to undergo the best-founded, and that which produced the most
perceptible results. The comic poets, who had always been more or less
conscious of their sins, and had at all events not defended them by the
ingenious sophistries which it has pleased later literary criticism to
suggest on their behalf, now began with uneasy merriment to allude in
their prologues to the reformation which had come over the spirit of the
town. Writers like Mrs Centlivre became anxious to reclaim their
offenders with much emphasis in the fifth act; and Colley Cibber--whose
_Apology for his Life_ furnishes a useful view of this and the
subsequent period of the history of the stage, with which he was
connected as author, manager and actor (excelling in this capacity as
representative of those fools with which he peopled the comic
stage)[232]--may be credited with having first deliberately made the
pathetic treatment of a moral sentiment the basis of the action of a
comic drama. But he cannot be said to have consistently pursued the vein
which in his _Careless Husband_ (1704) he had essayed. His _Non-Juror_
is a political adaptation of _Tartuffe_; and his almost equally
celebrated _Provoked Husband_ only supplied a happy ending to Vanbrugh's
unfinished play. Sir R. Steele, in accordance with his general
tendencies as a writer, pursued a still more definite moral purpose in
his comedies; but his genius perhaps lacked the sustained vigour
necessary for a dramatist, and his humour naturally sought the aid of
pathos. From partial[233] he passed to more complete[234] experiment;
and thus these two writers, who transplanted to the comic stage a
tendency towards the treatment of domestic themes noticeable in such
writers of Restoration tragedy as Southerne and Rowe, became the
founders of _sentimental comedy_, a species which exercised a most
depressing influence upon the progress of English drama, and helped to
hasten the decline of its comic branch. With _Cato_ English tragedy
committed suicide, though its pale ghost survived; with _The Conscious
Lovers_ English comedy sank for long into the tearful embraces of
artificiality and weakness.
The drama and stage in the period before Garrick.
Garrick.
During the 18th century the productions of dramatic literature were
still as a rule legitimately designed to meet the demands of the stage,
from which its higher efforts afterwards to so large an extent became
dissociated. The goodwill of most sections of the public continued to be
steadily accorded to a theatre which had ceased to defy the accepted
laws and traditions of morality; and the opposition still aroused by it
was confined to a small minority of thinkers, though these included some
who were far from being puritans. John Dennis was not thought to have
the worst of the controversy, when he defended the stage against the
attack of an opponent far above him in stature--the great mystic William
Law[235]--and to John Wesley himself it seemed that "a great deal more
might be said in defence of seeing a serious tragedy" than of taking
part in the amusements of bear-baiting and cock-fighting. On the other
hand, the demands of the stage and those of its patrons and of the
public of the "Augustan" age, and of that which succeeded it, were, in
general, fast bound by the trammels of a taste with which a revival of
the poetic drama long remained irreconcilable. There is every reason to
conclude that the art of acting progressed in the same direction of
artificiality, and became stereotyped in forms corresponding to the
"chant" which represented tragic declamation in a series of actors
ending with Quin and Macklin. In the latter must be recognized features
of a precursor, but it was reserved to the genius of Garrick, whose
theatrical career extended from 1741 to 1776, to open a new era in his
art. His unparalleled success was due in the first instance to his
incomparable natural gifts; yet these were indisputably enhanced by a
careful and continued literary training, and ennobled by a purpose
which prompted him to essay the noblest, as he was capable of performing
the most various, range of English theatrical characters. By devoting
himself as actor and manager with special zeal to the production of
Shakespeare, Garrick permanently popularized on the national stage the
greatest creations of English drama, and indirectly helped to seal the
doom of what survived of the tendency to maintain in the most ambitious
walks of dramatic literature the nerveless traditions of the
pseudo-classical school. A generation of celebrated actors and
actresses, many of whom live for us in the drastic epigrams of
Churchill's _Rosciad_ (1761), were his helpmates or his rivals; but
their fame has paled, while his is destined to endure as that of one of
the typical masters of his art.
Decline of tragedy.
The contrast between the tragedy of the 18th century and those plays of
Shakespeare and one or two other Elizabethans which already before
Garrick were known to the English stage, was weakened by the mutilated
form in which the old masterpieces generally, if not always, made their
appearance there. Even so, however, there are perhaps few instances in
theatrical history in which so unequal a competition was so long
sustained. In the hands of the tragic poets of the age of Pope, as well
as that of Johnson, tragedy had hopelessly stiffened into the forms of
its accepted French models. Direct reproductions of these continued, as
in Ambrose Philips's and Charles Johnson's (1679-1748) translations from
Racine, and Aaron Hill's from Voltaire. Among other tragic dramatists of
the earlier part of the century may be mentioned J. Hughes, who, after
assisting Addison in his _Cato_, produced at least one praiseworthy
tragedy of his own;[236] E. Fenton, a joint translator of "Pope's
_Homer_" and the author of one extremely successful drama on a theme of
singularly enduring interest,[237] and L. Theobald the first hero of the
_Dunciad_, who, besides translations of Greek dramas, produced a few
more or less original plays, one of which he was daring enough to father
upon Shakespeare.[238] A more distinguished name is that of J. Thomson,
whose unlucky _Sophonisba_ and subsequent tragedies are, however, barely
remembered by the side of his poems (_The Seasons_, &c.). The literary
genius of E. Young, on the other hand, possessed vigour and variety
enough to distinguish his tragedies from the ordinary level of Augustan
plays; in one of them he seems to challenge comparison in the treatment
of his theme with a very different rival,[239] but by his main
characteristics as a dramatist he belongs to the school of his
contemporaries. The endeavour of G. Lillo, in his _London Merchant, or
George Barnwell_ (1731), to bring the tragic lessons of terror and pity
directly home to his fellow-citizens exercised an extraordinarily
widespread as well as enduring effect on the history of the 18th-century
drama. At home, they gave birth to the new, or, more properly speaking,
to the revived, species of domestic tragedy, which connects itself more
or less closely with a notable epoch in the history of English
prose-fiction as well as of English painting. Abroad, this play--whose
success was of the kind which nothing can kill--supplied the text to the
teachings of Diderot, as well as an example to his own dramatic
attempts; and through Diderot the impulse communicated itself to
Lessing, and long exercised a great effect upon the literature of the
German stage. At the same time, it must be allowed that Lillo's
pedestrian muse failed in the end to satisfy higher artistic demands
than those met in his most popular play, while in another[240] she was
less consciously guilty of an aberration towards that "tragedy of
destiny," which, in the modern drama at least, obscures the ethical
character of all tragic actions. "Classical" tragedy in the generation
of Dr Johnson pursued the even tenor of its way, the dictator himself
treading with solemn footfall in the accustomed path,[241] and W. Mason
making the futile attempt to produce a close imitation of Greek
models.[242] The best-remembered tragedy of the century, Home's
_Douglas_ (1757), was the production of an author whose famous kinsman,
David Hume (though no friend of the contemporary English stage), had
advised him "to read Shakespeare, but to get Racine and Voltaire by
heart." The indisputable merits of the play cannot blind us to the fact
that _Douglas_ is the offspring of _Merope_.
English opera.
While thus no high creative talent arose to revive the poetic genius of
English tragedy, comedy, which had to contend against the same rivals,
naturally met the demands of the conflict with greater buoyancy. The
history of the most formidable of those rivals, Music, forms no part of
this sketch; but the points of contact between its progress and the
history of dramatic literature cannot be altogether left out of sight.
H. Purcell's endeavours to unite English music to the words of English
poets were now a thing of the past; analogous attempts in the direction
of musical dialogue, which have been insufficiently noticed, had
likewise proved transitory; and the isolated efforts of Addison[243] and
others to recover the operatic stage for the native tongue had proved
powerless. Italian texts, which had first made their entrance piecemeal,
in the end asserted themselves in their entirety; and the marvellously
assimilative genius of Handel completed the triumphs of a form of art
which no longer had any connexion with the English drama, and which
reached the height of its fashionable popularity about the time when
Garrick began to adorn the national stage. In one form, however, the
English opera was preserved as a pleasing species of the popular drama.
The pastoral drama had (in 1725) produced an isolated aftergrowth in
Allan Ramsay's _Gentle Shepherd_, which, with genuine freshness and
humour, but without a trace of burlesque, transferred to the scenery of
the Pentland Hills the lovely tale of Florizel and Perdita. The dramatic
form of this poem is only an accident, but it doubtless suggested an
experiment of a different kind to the most playful of London wits. Gay's
"Newgate Pastoral" of _The Beggar's Opera_ (1728), in which the amusing
text of a burlesque farce was interspersed with songs set to popular
airs, caught the fancy of the town by this novel combination, and became
the ancestor of a series of agreeable productions, none of which,
however, not even its own continuation, _Polly_ (amazingly successful in
book form, after its production was forbidden by the lord chamberlain),
have ever rivalled it in success or celebrity. Among these may be
mentioned the pieces of I. Bickerstaffe[244] and C. Dibdin.[245] The
opera in England, as elsewhere, thus absorbed what vitality remained to
the pastoral drama, while to the ballet and the pantomime (whose glories
in England began at Covent Garden in 1733, and to whose popularity even
Garrick was obliged to defer) was left (in the 18th century at all
events) the inheritance of the external attractions of the mask and the
pageant.
Comedy. Burlesque.
The Licensing Act.
In the face of such various rivalries it is not strange that comedy,
instead of adhering to the narrow path which Steele and others had
marked out for her, should have permitted herself some vagaries of her
own. Gay's example pointed the way to a fatally facile form of the comic
art; and burlesque began to contribute its influence to the decline of
comedy. In an age when party-government was severely straining the
capabilities of its system, dramatic satire had not far to look for a
source of effective seasonings. The audacity of H. Fielding, whose
regular comedies (original or adapted) have secured no enduring
remembrance, but whose love of parody was afterwards to suggest to him
the theme of the first of the novels which have made his name immortal,
accordingly ventured in two extravaganzas[246] (so we should call them
in these days) upon a larger admixture of political with literary and
other satire. A third attempt[247] (which never reached the stage)
furnished the offended minister, Sir Robert Walpole, with the desired
occasion for placing a curb upon the licence of the theatre, such as
had already been advocated by a representative of its old civic
adversaries. The famous act of 1737 asserted no new principle, but
converted into legal power the customary authority hither exercised by
the lord chamberlain (to whom it had descended from the master of the
revels). The regular censorship which this act established has not
appreciably affected the literary progress of the English drama, and the
objections which have been raised against it seem to have addressed
themselves to practice rather than to principle. The liberty of the
stage is a question differing in its conditions from that of the liberty
of speech in general, or even from that of the liberty of the press; and
occasional lapses of official judgment weigh lightly in the balance
against the obvious advantages of a system which in a free country needs
only the vigilance of public opinion to prevent its abuse. The policy of
the restraint which the act of 1737 put upon the number of playhouses is
a different, but has long become an obsolete, question.[248]
Comedy in the latter half of the 18th century.
Brought back into its accustomed grooves, English comedy seemed inclined
to leave to farce the domain of healthy ridicule, and to coalesce with
domestic tragedy in the attempt to make the stage a vehicle of homespun
didactic morality. Farce had now become a genuine English species, and
has as such retained its vitality through all the subsequent fortunes of
the stage; it was actively cultivated by Garrick as both actor and
author; and he undoubtedly had more than a hand in the very best farce
of this age, which is ascribed to clerical authorship.[249] S. Foote,
whose comedies[250] and farces are distinguished both by wit and by
variety of characters (though it was an absurd misapplication of a great
name to call him the English Aristophanes), introduced into comic acting
the abuse of personal mimicry, for the exhibition of which he
ingeniously invented a series of entertainments, the parents of a long
progeny of imitations. Meanwhile, the domestic drama of the sentimental
kind achieved, though not immediately, a success only inferior to that
of _The London Merchant_, in _The Gamester_ of E. Moore, to which
Garrick seems to have directly contributed;[251] and sentimental comedy
courted sympathetic applause in the works of A. Murphy, the single
comedy of W. Whitehead,[252] and the earliest of H. Kelly.[153] It
cannot be said that this species was extinguished, as it is sometimes
assumed to have been, by O. Goldsmith; but he certainly published a
direct protest against it between the production of his admirable
character-comedy of _The Good-Natured Man_, and his delightfully brisk
and fresh _She Stoops to Conquer_, which, after startling critical
propriety from its self-conceit, taught comedy no longer to fear being
true to herself. The most successful efforts of the elder G. Colman[254]
had in them something of the spirit of genuine comedy, besides a finish
which, however playwrights may shut their eyes to the fact, is one of
the qualities which ensure a long life to a play. And in the
masterpieces of R. B. Sheridan some of the happiest features of the
comedy of Congreve were revived, together with its too uniform
brilliancy of dialogue, but without its indecency of tone. The varnish
of the age is indeed upon the style, and the hollowness of its morality
in much of the sentiment (even where that sentiment is meant for the
audience) of _The Rivals_ and _The School for Scandal_; but in tact of
construction, in distinctness of characters, and in pungency of social
satire, they are to be ranked among the glories of English comedy.
Something in Sheridan's style, but quite without his brilliancy, is the
most successful play[255] of the unfortunate General Burgoyne. R.
Cumberland, who too consciously endeavoured to excel both in sentimental
morality and in comic characterization, in which he was devoid of depth,
closes the list of authors of higher pretensions who wrote for the
theatre.[256] Like him, Mrs Cowley[257] ("Anna Matilda"), T.
Holcroft,[258] and G. Colman the younger,[259] all writers of popular
comedies, as well as the prolific J. O'Keefe (1746-1833), who
contributed to nearly every species of the comic drama, survived into
the 19th century. To an earlier date belong the favourite burlesques of
O'Keefe's countryman K. O'Hara[260] (d. 1782), good examples of a
species the further history of which may be left aside. In the hands of
at least one later writer, J. R. Planche, it proved capable of
satisfying a more refined taste than his successors have habitually
consulted.
The English drama of the 19th century.
The decline of dramatic composition of the higher class, perceptible in
the history of the English theatre about the beginning of the 19th
century, was justly attributed by Sir Walter Scott to the wearing out of
the French model that had been so long wrought upon; but when he
asserted that the new impulse which was sought in the dramatic
literature of Germany was derived from some of its worst, instead of
from its noblest, productions--from Kotzebue rather than from Lessing,
Schiller and Goethe--he showed a very imperfect acquaintance with a
complicated literary movement which was obliquely reflected in the
stage-plays of Iffland and his contemporaries. The change which was
coming over English literature was in truth of a wider and deeper nature
than it was possible for even one of its chief representatives to
perceive. As that literature freed itself from the fetters so long worn
by it as indispensable ornaments, and threw aside the veil which had so
long obscured both the full glory of its past and the lofty capabilities
of its future, it could not resort except tentatively to a form which
like the dramatic is bound by a hundred bonds to the life of the age
itself. Soon, the poems with which Scott and Byron, and the unrivalled
prose fictions with which Scott, both satisfied and stimulated the
imaginative demands of the public, diverted the attention of the
cultivated classes from dramatic literature, which was unable to escape,
with the light foot of verse or prose fiction, into "the new, the
romantic land." New themes, new ideas, new forms occupied a new
generation of writers and readers; nor did the drama readily lend itself
as a vessel into which to pour so many fermenting elements. In Byron the
impressions produced upon a mind not less open to impulses from without
than subjective in its way of recasting them, called forth a series of
dramatic attempts betraying a more or less wilful ignorance of the
demands of dramatic compositions; his beautiful _Manfred_, partly
suggested by Goethe's _Faust_, and his powerful _Cain_, have but the
form of plays; his tragedies on Italian historical subjects show some
resemblance in their political rhetoric to the contemporary works of
Alfieri; his _Sardanapalus_, autobiographically interesting, fails to
meet the demands of the stage; his _Werner_ (of which the authorship has
been ascribed to the duchess of Devonshire) is a hastily dramatized
sensation novel. To Coleridge (1772-1834), who gave to English
literature a splendidly loose translation of Schiller's _Wallenstein_,
the same poet's _Robbers_ (to which Wordsworth's only dramatic attempt,
the _Borderers_, is likewise indebted) had probably suggested the
subject of his tragedy of _Osorio_, afterwards acted under the title of
_Remorse_. Far superior to this is his later drama of _Zapolya_, a
genuine homage to Shakespeare, out of the themes of two of whose plays
it is gracefully woven. Scott, who in his earlier days had translated
Goethe's _Gutz von Berlichingen_, gained no reputation by his own
dramatic compositions. W. S. Landor, apart from those _Imaginary
Conversations_ upon which he best loved to expend powers of observation
and characterization such as have been given to few playwrights, cast
in a formally dramatic mould studies of character of which the value is
far from being confined to their wealth in beauties of detail. Of these
the magnificent, but in construction altogether undramatic, _Count
Julian_, is the most noteworthy. Shelley's _The Cenci_, on the other
hand, is not only a poem of great beauty, but a drama of true power,
abnormally revolting indeed in theme, but singularly pure and delicate
in treatment. A humbler niche in the temple of dramatic literature
belongs to some of the plays of C. R. Maturin,[261] Sir T. N.
Talfourd,[262] and Dean Milman.[263]
Divorced, except for passing moments, from the stage, English dramatic
literature could during much the greater part of the 19th century hardly
be regarded as a connected national growth; though, already in the last
decades of the Victorian age, the revival of public interest in the
theatre co-operated with a gradual change in poetic taste to awaken the
hope of a future living reunion. Among English poets who lived in this
period, Sir Henry Taylor probably approached nearest to the objective
treatment and the amplitude of style characteristic of the Elizabethan
drama.[264] R. H. Horne, long an almost solitary survivor of the
romantic school, was able in at least one memorable dramatic attempt to
revive something of the early Elizabethan spirit.[265] Of the chief
poets of the age, Tennyson only in his later years addressed himself to
a form of composition little suited to his genius, though the very fact
of the homage paid by him to the national forms of the historic drama
and of romantic comedy could not fail to ennoble the contemporary
stage.[266] Matthew Arnold's stately revival of the traditions of
classical tragedy proper, on the other hand, deliberately excluded
itself from any such contact;[267] while Longfellow's refined literary
culture and graceful facility of form made ready use of a quasi-dramatic
medieval vesture.[268] William Morris's single "morality," too, cannot
be regarded as a contribution to dramatic literature proper.[269] Of
very different importance are the excursions into dramatic composition
of Robert Browning, whose place in the living inheritance of the English
drama has in one instance at least been not unsuccessfully vindicated by
a later age, and some of whose greatest gifts are beyond a doubt
displayed in his dramatic work;[270] and the sustained endeavours of A.
C. Swinburne, after adding a flower of exquisite beauty to the wreath
which the lovers of the Attic muse have laid at her feet, to enrich the
national historic drama by a trilogy instinct with the ardent eloquence
of passion.[271] Until a date too near the times in which we live to
admit of its being fixed with precision, most of the English writers who
sought to preserve a connexion between their dramatic productions and
the demands of the stage addressed themselves to the theatrical rather
than the literary public--for the distinction, in those times at all
events, was by no means without a difference. The modestly simple and
judiciously concentrated efforts of Joanna Baillie deserve a respectful
remembrance in the records of literature as well as of the stage, though
the day has passed when the theory which suggested her _Plays on the
Passions_ could find acceptance among critics, or her exemplifications
of it satisfy the demands of playgoers. Sheridan Knowles, on the other
hand, composed his conventional semblances of genuine tragedy and comedy
with a thorough knowledge of stage effect, and some of them can hardly
yet be said to have vanished from the stage.[272] The first Lord Lytton,
though his plays were for the most part of a lighter texture, showed
even more artificiality of sentiment in their conception and execution;
but the romantic touch which he imparted to at least one of them
accounts for its long-lived popularity. Among later Victorian
playwrights T. W. Robertson brought back a breath of naturalness into
the acted comic drama; Tom Taylor, rivalling Lope in fertility, made
little pretence to original invention, but adapted with an instinct that
rarely failed him, and materially helped to keep the theatrical
diversions of his age sound and pure; an endeavour in which he had the
co-operation of Charles Reade and that of most of those who competed
with them for the favour of generations of playgoers more easily
contented than their successors. The one deplorable aspect of this age
of the English drama was to be found neither in the sphere of tragedy
nor in that of comedy--nor even in that of farce. It was presented in
the low depths of contemporary burlesque, which had degenerated from the
graceful extravaganza of J. R. Planche into witless and tasteless
emptiness.
Curiously enough, it was at this point that something like real
originality--discovering a new sub-species of its own--first began, with
the aid of a sister-art, to renovate the English popular comic stage. At
the beginning of the 19th century the greatest tragic actress of the
English theatre, Mrs Siddons, had passed her prime; and before its
second decade had closed, not only she (1812) but her brother John
Kemble (1817), the representative of a grand style of acting which later
generations might conceivably find overpowering, had withdrawn from the
boards. Mrs Siddons was soon followed into retirement by her successor
Miss O'Neill (1819); while Kemble's brilliant later rival, Edmund Kean,
an actor the intuitions of whose genius seem to have supplied, so far as
intuition ever can supply, the absence of a consecutive self-culture,
remained on the stage till his death in 1833. Young, Macready, and
others handed down some of the traditions of the older school of acting
to the very few artists who remained to suggest its semblance to a later
generation. Even these--among them S. Phelps, whose special merit it was
to present to a later age, accustomed to elaborate theatrical
environments, dramatic masterpieces as dependent upon themselves and
adequate interpretation; and the foremost English actress of the earlier
Victorian age, Helen Faucit (Lady Martin)--were unable to leave a school
of acting behind them. Still less was this possible to Charles Kean the
younger, with whom the decorative production of Shakespearian plays
really had its beginning; or even to Sir Henry Irving, an actor of
genius, but also an irrepressible and almost eccentric theatrical
personality, whose great service to the English drama was his faith in
its masterpieces. The comic stage was fortunate in an ampler
aftergrowth, from generation to generation, of the successors of the old
actors who live for us all in the reminiscences of Charles Lamb; nor
were the links suddenly snapped which bound the humours of the present
to those of the past. In the first decade of the 20th century a
generation still survived which could recall, with many other similar
joys, the brilliant levity of Charles Mathews the younger; the not less
irresistible stolidity of J. B. Buckstone; the solemn fooling of H.
Compton (1805-1877); the subtle humours of J. L. Toole, and the frolic
charm of Marie Wilton (Lady Bancroft), the most original comic actress
of her time. (A. W. W.)
_Recent English Drama._--In England the whole mechanism of theatrical
life had undergone a radical change in the middle decades of the 19th
century. At the root of this change lay the immense growth of population
and the enormously increased facilities of communication between London
and the provinces. Similar causes came into operation, of course, in
France, Germany and Austria, but were much less distinctly felt, because
the numerous and important subventioned theatres of these countries
remained more or less unaffected by economic influences. Free trade in
theatricals (subject only to certain licensing regulations and to a
court censorship of new plays) was established in England by an act of
1843, which abolished the long moribund monopoly of the "legitimate
drama" claimed by the "Patent Theatres" of Drury Lane and Covent Garden.
The drama was thus formally subjected to the operation of the law of
supply and demand, like any other article of commerce, and managers were
left, unaided and unhampered by any subvention or privilege, to cater to
the tastes of a huge and growing community. Theatres very soon
multiplied, competition grew ever keener, and the long run, with its
accompaniments of ostentatious decoration and lavish advertisement,
became the one object of managerial effort. This process of evolution
may be said to have begun in the second quarter of the 19th century and
completed itself in the 3rd. The system which obtains to-day, almost
unforeseen in 1825, was in full operation in 1875. The repertory
theatre, with its constant changes of programme, maintained on the
continent partly by subventions, partly by the mere force of artistic
tradition, had become in England a faint and far-off memory. There was
not a single theatre in London at which plays, old and new, were not
selected and mounted solely with a view to their continuous performance
for as many nights as possible, anything short of fifty nights
constituting an ignominious and probably ruinous failure. It was found,
too, that those theatres were most successful which were devoted
exclusively to exploiting the talent of an individual actor. Thus when
the fourth quarter of the century opened, the long "run" and the
actor-manager were in firm possession of the field.
The outlook was in many ways far from encouraging. It was not quite so
black, indeed, as it had been in the late 'fifties and early 'sixties,
when the "legitimate" enterprises of Phelps at Sadler's Wells and
Charles Kean at the Princess's had failed to hold their ground, and when
modern comedy and drama were represented almost exclusively by
adaptations from the French. There had been a slight stirring of
originality in the series of comedies produced by T. W. Robertson at the
Prince of Wales's theatre, where, under the management of Bancroft
(q.v.) a new school of mounting and acting, minutely faithful (in theory
at any rate) to everyday reality, had come into existence. But the hopes
of a revival of English comedy seemed to have died with Robertson's
death. One of his followers, James Albery, possessed both imagination
and wit, but had not the strength of character to do justice to his
talent, and sank into a mere adapter. In the plays of another disciple,
H. J. Byron, the Robertsonian or "cup-and-saucer" school declined upon
sheer inanity. Of the numerous plays signed by Tom Taylor some were
original in substance, but all were cast in the machine-made French
mould. Wilkie Collins, in dramatizing some of his novels, produced
somewhat crude anticipations of the modern "problem play." The literary
talent of W. S. Gilbert displayed itself in a group of comedies both in
verse and prose; but Gilbert saw life from too peculiar an angle to
represent it otherwise than fantastically. The Robertsonian impulse
seemed to have died utterly away, leaving behind it only five or six
very insubstantial comedies and a subdued, unrhetorical method in
acting. This method the Bancrofts proceeded to apply, during the
'seventies, to revivals of stage classics, such as _The School for
Scandal_, _Money_ and _Masks and Faces_, and to adaptations from the
French of Sardou.
While the modern drama appeared to have relapsed into a comatose
condition, poetic and romantic drama was giving some signs of life. At
the Lyceum in 1871 Henry Irving had leapt into fame by means of his
performance of Mathias in _The Bells_, an adaptation from the French of
Erckmann-Chatrian. He followed this up by an admirably picturesque
performance of the title-part in _Charles I._ by W. G. Wills. In the
autumn of 1874 the great success of Irving's Hamlet was hailed as the
prelude to a revival of tragic acting. As a matter of fact, it was the
prelude to a long series of remarkable achievements in romantic drama
and melodrama. Irving's lack of physical and vocal resources prevented
him from scaling the heights of tragedy, and his Othello, Macbeth, and
Lear could not be ranked among his successes; but he was admirable in
such parts as Richard III., Shylock, Iago and Wolsey, while in
melodramatic parts, such as Louis XI. and the hero and villain of _The
Lyons Mail_, he was unsurpassed. Mephistopheles in a version of _Faust_
(1885), perhaps the greatest popular success of his career, added
nothing to his reputation for artistic intelligence; but on the other
hand his Becket in Tennyson's play of that name (1893) was one of his
most masterly efforts. His management of the Lyceum (1878-1899) did so
much to raise the status of the actor and to restore the prestige of
poetic drama, that the knighthood conferred upon him in 1895 was felt to
be no more than an appropriate recognition of his services. But his
managerial career had scarcely any significance for the living English
drama. He seldom experimented with a new play, and, of the few which he
did produce, only _The Cup_ and _Becket_ by Lord Tennyson have the
remotest chance of being remembered.
To trace the history of the new English drama, then, we must go back to
the Prince of Wales's theatre. Even while it seemed that French comedy
of the school of Scribe was resuming its baneful predominance, the seeds
of a new order of things were slowly germinating. _Diplomacy_, an
adaptation of Sardou's _Dora_, produced in 1878, brought together on the
Prince of Wales's stage Mr and Mrs Bancroft, Mr and Mrs Kendal, John
Clayton and Arthur Cecil--in other words, the future managers of the
Haymarket, the St James's and the Court theatres, which were destined to
see the first real stirrings of a literary revival. Mr and Mrs Kendal,
who, in conjunction with John Hare, managed the St James's theatre from
1879 to 1888, produced A. W. Pinero's first play of any consequence,
_The Money-Spinner_ (1881), and afterwards _The Squire_ (1882) and _The
Hobby Horse_ (1887). The Bancrofts, who, after entirely rebuilding the
Haymarket theatre, managed it from 1880 till their retirement in 1885,
produced in 1883 Pinero's _Lords and Commons_; and Messrs Clayton and
Cecil produced at the Court theatre between 1885 and 1887 his three
brilliant farces, _The Magistrate_, _The Schoolmistress_ and _Dandy
Dick_, which, with the sentimental comedy, _Sweet Lavender_, produced at
Terry's theatre in 1888, assured his position as an original and fertile
dramatic humorist of no small literary power. It is to be noted,
however, that Pinero was almost the only original playwright represented
under the Bancroft, Hare-Kendal and Clayton-Cecil managements, which
relied for the rest upon adaptations and revivals. Adaptations of French
vaudevilles were the staple productions of Charles Wyndham's management
at the Criterion from its beginning in 1876 until 1893, when he first
produced an original play of any importance. When Herbert Beerbohm Tree
went into management at the Haymarket in 1887, he still relied largely
on plays of foreign origin. George Alexander's first managerial ventures
(Avenue theatre, 1890) were two adaptations from the French. Until well
on in the 'eighties, indeed, adaptation from the French was held the
normal occupation of the British playwright, and original composition a
mere episode. Robertson, Byron, Albery, Gilbert, Tom Taylor, Charles
Reade, Herman Merivale, G. W. Godfrey, all produced numerous
adaptations; Sydney Grundy was for twenty years occupied almost
exclusively in this class of work; Pinero himself has adapted more than
one French play. The 'eighties, then, may on the whole be regarded as
showing a very gradual decline in the predominance of France on the
English stage, and an equally slow revival of originality, so far as
comedy and drama were concerned, manifesting itself mainly in the plays
of Pinero.
The reaction against French influence, however, was no less apparent in
the domain of melodrama and operetta than in that of comedy and drama.
Until well on in the 'seventies, D'Ennery and his disciples, adapted and
imitated by Dion Boucicault and others, ruled the melodramatic stage.
The reaction asserted itself in two quarters--in the East End at the
Grecian theatre, and in the West End at the Princess's. In _The World_,
produced at Drury Lane in 1880, Paul Meritt (d. 1895) and Henry Pettitt
(d. 1893) brought to the West End the "Grecian" type of popular drama;
and at Drury Lane it survived in the elaborately spectacular form
imparted to it by Sir Augustus Harris, who managed that theatre from
1879 till his death in 1896. The production of G. R. Sims's _Lights o'
London_ at the Princess's in 1881, under Wilson Barrett's management,
also marked a new departure. This style of melodrama was chiefly
cultivated at the Adelphi theatre, from 1882 until the end of the
century, when it died out there as a regular institution, apparently
because a host of suburban theatres drew away its audiences. Of all
these English melodramas, only one, _The Silver King_, by Henry Arthur
Jones (Princess's, 1882), could for a moment compare in invention or
technical skill with the French dramas they supplanted. The fact
remains, however, that even on this lowest level of dramatic art the
current of the time set decisively towards home-made pictures of English
life, however crude and puerile.
For twenty-five years, from 1865 to 1890, the English stage was overrun
with French operettas of the school of Offenbach. Hastily adapted by
slovenly hacks, their librettos (often witty in the original) became
incredible farragos of metreless doggrel and punning ineptitude. The
great majority of them are now so utterly forgotten that it is hard to
realize how, in their heyday, they swarmed on every hand in London and
the provinces. The reaction began in 1875 with the performance at the
Royalty theatre of _Trial by Jury_, by W. S. Gilbert and Arthur
Sullivan. This was the prelude to that brilliant series of witty and
melodious extravaganzas which began with _The Sorcerer_ at the Opera
Comique theatre in 1877, but was mainly associated with the Savoy
theatre, opened by R. D'Oyly Carte (d. 1901) in 1881. Little by little
the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (of which the most famous, perhaps,
were _H.M.S. Pinafore_, 1878, _Patience_, 1881, and _The Mikado_, 1885)
undermined the popularity of the French opera-bouffes, and at the same
time that of the indigenous "burlesques" which, graceful enough in the
hands of their inventor J. R. Planche, had become mere incoherent
jumbles of buffoonery, devoid alike of dramatic ingenuity and of
literary form. When, early in the 'nineties, the collaboration between
Gilbert and Sullivan became intermittent, and the vogue of the Savoy
somewhat declined, a new class of extravaganza arose, under the
designation of "musical comedy" or "musical farce." It first took form
in a piece called _In Town_, by Messrs "Adrian Ross" and Osmond Carr
(Prince of Wales's theatre, 1892), and rapidly became very popular. In
these plays the scene and costumes are almost always modern though
sometimes exotic, and the prose dialogue, setting forth an attenuated
and entirely negligible plot, is frequently interrupted by musical
numbers. The lyrics are often very clever pieces of rhyming, totally
different from the inane doggrel of the old opera-bouffes and
burlesques. In other respects there is little to be said for the
literary or intellectual quality of "musical farce"; but, being an
entirely English (or Anglo-American) product, it falls into line with
the other indications we have noted of the general decline--one might
almost say extinction--of French influence on the English stage.
To what causes are we to trace this gradual disuse of adaptation? In the
domain of modern comedy and drama, to two causes acting simultaneously:
the decline in France of the method of Scribe, which produced
"well-made," exportable plays, more or less suited to any climate and
environment; and the rise in England of a generation of playwrights more
original, thoughtful and able than their predecessors. It is not at all
to be taken for granted that the falling off in the supply of exportable
plays meant a decline in the absolute merit of French drama. The
historian of the future may very possibly regard the movement in France,
no less than the movement in England, as a step in advance, and may even
see in the two movements co-ordinate manifestations of one tendency. Be
this as it may, the fact is certain that as the playwrights of the
Second Empire gradually died off, and were succeeded by the authors of
the "new comedy," plays which would bear transplantation became ever
fewer and farther between. Of recent years Henri Bernstein, author of
_Le Voleur_ and _Samson_, has been almost the only French dramatist
whose works have found a ready and steady market in England. Attempts to
acclimatize French poetical drama--_Pour la Couronne_, _Le Chemineau_,
_Cyrano de Bergerac_--were all more or less unsuccessful.
Having noted the decline of adaptation, we may now trace a stage farther
the development of the English drama. The first stage, already surveyed,
ends with the production of _Sweet Lavender_ in 1888. Up to this point
its author, Pinero (b. 1855), stood practically alone, and had won his
chief successes as a humorist. Henry Arthur Jones (b. 1851) was known as
little more than an able melodramatist, though in one play, _Saints and
Sinners_ (1884), he had made some attempt at a serious study of
provincial life. R. C. Carton (b. 1856) had written, in collaboration,
one or two plays of slight account. Sydney Grundy (b. 1848) had produced
scarcely any original work. The second stage may be taken as extending
from 1889 to 1893. On the 24th of April 1889 John Hare opened the new
Garrick theatre with _The Profligate_, by Pinero--an unripe and
superficial piece of work in many ways, but still a great advance, both
in ambition and achievement, upon any original work the stage had seen
for many a year.
With all its faults, it may be said that _The Profligate_ notably
enlarged at one stroke the domain open to the English dramatist. And it
did not stand alone. The same year saw the production of two plays by H.
A. Jones, _Wealth_ and _The Middleman_, in which a distinct effort
towards a serious criticism of life was observable, and of two plays by
Sydney Grundy, _A Fool's Paradise_ and _A White Lie_, which, though very
French in method, were at least original in substance. Jones during the
next two years made a steady advance with _Judah_ (1890), _The Dancing
Girl_ and _The Crusaders_ (1891). Pinero in these years was putting
forth less than his whole strength in _The Cabinet Minister_ (1890),
_Lady Bountiful_ and _The Times_ (1891), and _The Amazons_ (March 1893).
But meanwhile new talents were coming forward. The management of George
Alexander, which opened at the Avenue theatre in 1890, but was
transferred in the following year to the St James's, brought prominently
to the front R. C. Carton, Haddon Chambers and Oscar Wilde. Carton's two
sentimental comedies, _Sunlight and Shadow_ (1890) and _Liberty Hall_
(1892), showed excellent workmanship, but did not yet reveal his true
originality as a humorist. Haddon Chambers's work (notably _The Idler_,
1891) was as yet sufficiently commonplace; but in _Lady Windermere's
Fan_ (1892) Oscar Wilde showed himself at his first attempt a brilliant
and accomplished dramatist. Wilde's subsequent plays, _A Woman of No
Importance_ (1893) and _An Ideal Husband_ and _The Importance of being
Earnest_ (1895), though marred by mannerism and insincerity, did much to
promote the movement we are here tracing.
As the production of _The Profligate_ marked the opening of the second
period in the revival of English drama, so the production of the same
author's _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ is very clearly the starting-point
of the third period. Before attempting to trace its course we may do
well to glance at certain conditions which probably influenced it.
In the first place, economic conditions. The Bancroft-Robertson movement
at the old Prince of Wales's, between 1865 and 1870, was of even more
importance from an economic than from a literary point of view. By
making their little theatre a luxurious place of resort, and faithfully
imitating in their productions the accent, costume and furniture of
upper and upper-middle class life, the Bancrofts had initiated a
reconciliation between society and the stage. Throughout the middle
decades of the century it was the constant complaint of the managers
that the world of wealth and fashion could not be tempted to the
theatre. The Bancroft management changed all that. It was at the Prince
of Wales's that half-guinea stalls were first introduced; and these
stalls were always filled. As other theatres adopted the same policy of
upholstery, both on and off the stage, fashion extended its complaisance
to them as well. In yet another way the reconciliation was promoted--by
the ever-increasing tendency of young men and women of good birth and
education to seek a career upon the English stage. The theatre, in
short, became at this period one of the favourite amusements of
fashionable (though scarcely of intellectual) society in London. It is
often contended that the influence of the sensual and cynical stall
audience is a pernicious one. In some ways, no doubt, it is detrimental;
but there is another side to the case. Even the cynicism of society
marks an intellectual advance upon the sheer rusticity which prevailed
during the middle years of the 19th century and accepted without a
murmur plays (original and adapted) which bore no sort of relation to
life. In a celebrated essay published in 1879, Matthew Arnold (whose
occasional dramatic criticisms were very influential in intellectual
circles) dwelt on the sufficiently obvious fact that the result of
giving English names and costumes to French characters was to make their
sayings and doings utterly unreal and "fantastic." During the years of
French ascendancy, audiences had quite forgotten that it was possible
for the stage to be other than "fantastic" in this sense. They no
longer thought of comparing the mimic world with the real world, but
were content with what may be called abstract humour and pathos, often
of the crudest quality. The cultivation of external realism, coinciding
with, and in part occasioning, the return of society to the playhouse,
gradually led to a demand for some approach to plausibility in character
and action as well as in costume and decoration. The stage ceased to be
entirely "fantastic," and began to essay, however imperfectly, the
representation, the criticism of life. It cannot be denied that the
influence of society tended to narrow the outlook of English dramatists
and to trivialize their tone of thought. But this was a passing phase of
development; and cleverly trivial representations of reality are, after
all, to be preferred to brainless concoctions of sheer emptiness.
Quite as important, from the economic point of view, as the
reconciliation of society to the stage, was the reorganization of the
mechanism of theatrical life in the provinces which took place between
1865 and 1875. From the Restoration to the middle of the 19th century
the system of "stock companies" had been universal. Every great town in
the three kingdoms had its established theatre with a resident company,
playing the "legitimate" repertory, and competing, often by illegitimate
means, for the possession of new London successes. The smaller towns,
and even villages, were grouped into local "circuits," each served by
one manager with his troupe of strollers. The "circuits" supplied actors
to the resident stock companies, and the stock companies served as
nurseries to the patent theatres in London. Metropolitan "stars"
travelled from one country theatre to another, generally alone,
sometimes with one or two subordinates in their train, and were
"supported," as the phrase went, by the stock company of each theatre.
Under this system, scenery, costumes and appointments were often
grotesquely inadequate, and performances almost always rough and
unfinished. On the other hand, the constant practice in a great number
and variety of characters afforded valuable training for actors, and
developed many remarkable talents. As a source of revenue to authors,
the provinces were practically negligible. Stageright was unprotected by
law; and even if it had been protected, it is doubtful whether authors
could have got any considerable fees out of country managers, whose
precarious ventures usually left them a small enough margin of profit.
The spread of railways throughout the country gradually put an end to
this system. The "circuits" disappeared early in the 'fifties, the stock
companies survived until about the middle of the 'seventies. As soon as
it was found easy to transport whole companies, and even great
quantities of scenery, from theatre to theatre throughout the length and
breadth of Great Britain, it became apparent that the rough makeshifts
of the stock company system were doomed. Here again we can trace to the
old Prince of Wales's theatre the first distinct impulse towards the new
order of things. Robertson's comedies not only encouraged but absolutely
required a style of art, in mounting, stage-management and acting, not
to be found in the country theatres. To entrust them to the stock
companies was well-nigh impossible. On the other hand, to quote Sir
Squire Bancroft, "perhaps no play was ever better suited than _Caste_ to
a travelling company; the parts being few, the scenery and dresses quite
simple, and consequently the expenses very much reduced." In 1867, then,
a company was organized and rehearsed in London to carry round the
provincial theatres as exact a reproduction as possible of the London
performance of _Caste_ and Robertson's other comedies. The smoothness of
the representation, the delicacy of the interplay among the characters,
were new to provincial audiences, and the success was remarkable. About
the same time the whole Haymarket company, under Buckstone's management,
began to make frequent rounds of the country theatres; and other
"touring combinations" were soon organized. It is manifest that the
"combination" system and the stock company system cannot long coexist,
for a manager cannot afford to keep a stock company idle while a London
combination is occupying his theatre. The stock companies, therefore,
soon dwindled away, and were probably quite extinct before the end of
the 'seventies. Under the present system, no sooner is a play an
established success in London than it is reproduced in one, two or three
exact copies and sent round the provincial theatres (and the numerous
suburban theatres which have sprung up since 1895), Company A serving
first-class towns, Company B the second-class towns, and so forth. The
process is very like that of taking plaster casts of a statue, and the
provincial companies often stand to their London originals very much in
the relation of plaster to marble. Even the London scenery is faithfully
reproduced in material of extra strength, to stand the wear-and-tear of
constant removal. The result is that, instead of the square pegs in
round holes of the old stock company system, provincial audiences now
see pegs carefully adjusted to the particular holes they occupy, and
often incapable of fitting any other. Instead of the rough performances
of old, they are now accustomed to performances of a mechanical and
soulless smoothness.
In some ways the gain in this respect is undeniable, in other ways the
loss is great. The provinces are no longer, in any effective sense, a
nursery of fresh talents for the London theatres, for the art acquired
in touring combinations is that of mimicry rather than of acting.
Moreover, provincial playgoers have lost all personal interest and pride
in their local theatres, which have no longer any individuality of their
own, but serve as a mere frame for the presentation of a series of
ready-made London pictures. Christmas pantomime is the only theatrical
product that has any really local flavour in it, and even this is often
only a second-hand London production, touched up with a few topical
allusions. Again, the railways which bring London productions to the
country take country playgoers by the thousand to London. The wealthier
classes, in the Lancashire, Yorkshire and Midland towns at any rate, do
almost all their theatre-going in London, or during the autumn months
when the leading London companies go on tour. Thus the better class of
comedy and drama has a hard fight to maintain itself in the provinces,
and the companies devoted to melodrama and musical farce enjoy an
ominous preponderance of popularity.
On the whole, however--and this is the main point to be observed with
regard to the literary development of the drama--the economic movement
of the five- and twenty years between 1865 and 1890 was enormously to
the advantage of the dramatic author. A London success meant a long
series of full houses at high prices, on which he took a handsome
percentage. The provinces, in which a popular playwright would often
have three or four plays going the rounds simultaneously, became a
steady source of income. And, finally, it was found possible, even
before international copyright came into force, to protect stageright in
the United States, so that about the beginning of the 'eighties large
receipts began to pour in from America. Thus successful dramatists,
instead of living from hand to mouth, like their predecessors of the
previous generation, found themselves in comfortable and even opulent
circumstances. They had leisure for reading, thought and careful
composition, and they could afford to gratify their ambition with an
occasional artistic experiment. Failure might mean a momentary loss of
prestige, but it would not spell ruin. A distinctly progressive spirit,
then, began to animate the leading English dramatists--a spirit which
found intelligent sympathy in such managers as John Hare, George
Alexander, Beerbohm Tree and Charles Wyndham. Nor must it be forgotten
that, though the laws of literary property, internal and international,
remained far from perfect, it was found possible to print and publish
plays without incurring loss of stageright either at home or in America.
The playwrights of the present generation have accordingly a motive for
giving literary form and polish to their work which was quite
inoperative with their predecessors, whose productions were either kept
jealously in manuscript or printed only in miserable and totally
unreadable stage editions. It is no small stimulus to ambition to know
that even if a play prove to be in advance of the standards of taste or
thought among the public to which it is originally presented, it will
not perish utterly, but will, if it have any inherent vitality, continue
to live as literature.
Influence of foreign drama.
Having now summed up the economic conditions which made for progress,
let us glance at certain intellectual influences which tended in the
same direction. The establishment of the Theatre Libre in Paris, towards
the close of 1887, unquestionably marked the beginning of a period of
restless experiment throughout the theatrical world of Europe. A.
Antoine and his supporters were in open rebellion against the artificial
methods of Scribe and the Second Empire playwrights. Their effort was to
transfer to the stage the realism, the so-called "naturalism," which had
been dominant in French fiction since 1870 or earlier; and this
naturalism was doubtless, in its turn, the outcome of the scientific
movement of the century. New methods (or ideals) of observation, and new
views as to the history and destiny of the race, could not fail to
produce a profound effect upon art; and though the modern theatre is a
cumbrous contrivance, slow to adjust its orientation to the winds of the
spirit, even it at last began to revolve, like a rusty windmill, so as
to fill its sails in the main current of the intellectual atmosphere.
Within three or four years of its inception, Antoine's experiment had
been imitated in Germany, England and America. The "Freie Buhne" of
Berlin came into existence in 1889, the Independent Theatre of London in
1891. Similar enterprises were set on foot in Munich and other cities.
In America several less formal experiments of a like nature were
attempted, chiefly in Boston and New York. Nor must it be forgotten that
in Paris itself the Theatre Libre did not stand alone. Many other
_theatres a cote_ sprang up, under such titles as "Theatre d'Art,"
"Theatre Moderne," "Theatre de l'Avenir Dramatique." The most important
and least ephemeral was the "Theatre de l'OEuvre," founded in 1893 by
Alex. Lugne-Poe, which represented mainly, though not exclusively, the
symbolist reaction against naturalism.
The impulse which led to the establishment of the Theatre Libre was, in
the first instance, entirely French. If any foreign influence helped to
shape its course, it was that of the great Russian novelists. Tolstoi's
_Puissance des tenebres_ was the only "exotic" play announced in
Antoine's opening manifesto. But the whole movement was soon to receive
a potent stimulus from the Norwegian poet Henrik Ibsen.
Ibsen's early romantic plays had been known in Germany since 1875. In
1878 _Pillars of Society_ and in 1880 _A Doll's House_ achieved wide
popularity, and held the German stage side by side with _A Bankruptcy_,
by Bjurnstjerne Bjurnson. But these plays had little influence on the
German drama. Their methods were, indeed, not essentially different from
those of the French school of the Second Empire, which were then
dominant in Germany as well as everywhere else. It was _Ghosts_ (acted
in Augsburg and Meiningen 1886, in Berlin 1887) that gave the impulse
which, coalescing with the kindred impulse from the French Theatre
Libre, was destined in the course of a few years to create a new
dramatic literature in Germany. During the middle decades of the century
Germany had produced some dramatists of solid and even remarkable
talent, such as Friedrich Hebbel, Heinrich Laube, Karl Gutzkow and
Gustav Freytag. Even the generation which held the stage after 1870, and
included Paul Heyse, Paul Lindau and Adolf Wilbrandt, with numerous
writers of light comedy and farce, such as E. Wichert, O. Blumenthal, G.
von Moser, A. L'Arronge and F. von Schunthan, had produced a good many
works of some merit. But, in the main, French artificiality and
frivolity predominated on the German stage. In point of native talent
and originality, the Austrian popular playwright Ludwig Anzengruber was
well ahead of his North German contemporaries. It was in 1889, with the
establishment of the Berlin Freie Buhne, that the reaction definitely
set in. In Berlin, as afterwards in London, _Ghosts_ was the first play
produced on the outpost stage, but it was followed in Berlin by a very
rapid development of native talent. Less than a month after the
performance of Ibsen's play, Gerhart Hauptmann came to the front with
_Vor Sonnenaufgang_, an immature piece of almost unrelieved Zolaism,
which he soon followed up, however, with much more important works. In
_Das Friedensfest_ (1890) and _Einsame Menschen_ (1891) he transferred
his allegiance from Zola to Ibsen. His true originality first manifested
itself in _Die Weber_ (1892); and subsequently he produced plays in
several different styles, all bearing the stamp of a potent
individuality. His most popular productions have been the dramatic poems
_Hannele_ and _Die versunkene Glocke_, the low-life comedy _Der
Biberpelz_, and the low-life tragedy _Fuhrmann Henschel_. Other
remarkable playwrights belonging to the Freie Buhne group are Max Halbe
(b. 1865), author of _Jugend_ and _Mutter Erde_, and Otto Erich
Hartleben (b. 1864), author of _Hanna Jagert_ and _Rosenmontag_. These
young men, however, so quickly gained the ear of the general public,
that the need for a special "free stage" was no longer felt, and the
Freie Buhne, having done its work, ceased to exist. Unlike the French
Theatre Libre and the English Independent theatre, it had been supported
from the outset by the most influential critics, and had won the day
almost without a battle. The productions of the new school soon made
their way even into some of the subventioned theatres; but it was the
unsubventioned Deutsches Theater of Berlin that most vigorously
continued the tradition of the Freie Buhne. One or two playwrights of
the new generation, however, did not actually belong to the Freie Buhne
group. Hermann Sudermann produced his first play, _Die Ehre_, in 1888,
and his most famous work, _Heimat_, in 1892. In him the influence of
Ibsen is very clearly perceptible; while Arthur Schnitzler of Vienna,
author of _Liebelei_, may rather be said to derive his inspiration from
the Parisian "new comedy." Originality, verging sometimes on
abnormality, distinguishes the work of Frank Wedekind (b. 1864), author
of _Erdgeist_ and _Fruhlingserwachen_. Hugo von Hofmannsthal (b. 1874),
in his _Elektra_ and _Odipus_, rehandles classic themes in the light of
modern anthropology and psychology.
The promoters of the Theatre Libre had probably never heard of Ibsen
when they established that institution, but three years later his fame
had reached France, and _Les Revenants_ was produced by the Theatre
Libre (29th May 1890). Within the next two or three years almost all his
modern plays were acted in Paris, most of them either by the Theatre
Libre or by L'OEuvre. Close upon the heels of the Ibsen influence
followed another, less potent, but by no means negligible. The exquisite
tragic symbolism of Maurice Maeterlinck began to find numerous admirers
about 1890. In 1891 his one-act play _L'Intruse_ was acted; in 1893,
_Pelleas et Melisande_. By this time, too, the reverberation of the
impulse which the Theatre Libre had given to the Freie Buhne began to be
felt in France. In 1893 Hauptmann's _Die Weber_ was acted in Paris, and,
being frequently repeated, made a deep and lasting impression.
The English analogue to the Theatre Libre, the Independent theatre,
opened its first season (March 13, 1891) with a performance of _Ghosts_.
This was not, however, the first introduction of Ibsen to the English
stage. On the 7th of June 1889 (six weeks after the production of _The
Profligate_) _A Doll's House_ was acted at the Novelty theatre, and ran
for three weeks, amid a storm of critical controversy. In the same year
_Pillars of Society_ was presented in London. In 1891 and 1892 _A Doll's
House_ was frequently acted; _Rosmersholm_ was produced in 1891, and
again in 1893; in May and June 1891 _Hedda Gabler_ had a run of several
weeks; and early in 1893 _The Master Builder_ enjoyed a similar passing
vogue. During these years, then, Ibsen was very much "in the air" in
England, as well as in France and Germany. The Independent theatre, in
the meantime, under the management of J. T. Grein, found but scanty
material to deal with. It presented translations of Zola's _Therese
Raquin_, and of _A Visit_, by the Danish dramatist Edward Brandes; but
it brought to the front only one English author of any note, in the
person of George Bernard Shaw, whose "didactic realistic play,"
_Widowers' Houses_, it produced in December 1892.
None the less is it true that the ferment of fresh energy, which between
1887 and 1893 had created a new dramatic literature both in France and
in Germany, was distinctly felt in England as well. England did not take
at all kindly to it. The productions of Ibsen's plays, in particular,
were received with an outcry of reprobation. A great part of this
clamour was due to sheer misunderstanding; but some of it, no doubt,
arose from genuine and deep-seated distaste. As for the dramatists of
recognized standing, they one and all, both from policy and from
conviction, adopted a hostile attitude towards Ibsen, expressing at most
a theoretical respect overborne by practical dislike. Yet his influence
permeated the atmosphere. He had revealed possibilities of technical
stagecraft and psychological delineation that, once realized, were not
to be banished from the mind of the thoughtful playwright. They haunted
him in spite of himself. Still subtler was the influence exerted over
the critics and the more intelligent public. Deeply and genuinely as
many of them disliked Ibsen's works, they found, when they returned to
the old-fashioned play, the adapted frivolity or the homegrown
sentimentalism, that they disliked this still more. On every side, then,
there was an instinctive or deliberate reaching forward towards
something new; and once again it was Pinero who ventured the decisive
step.
On the 27th of May 1893 _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ was produced at the
St James's theatre. With _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ the English acted
drama ceased to be a merely insular product, and took rank in the
literature of Europe. Here was a play which, whatever its faults, was
obviously comparable with the plays of Dumas, of Sudermann, of Bjurnson,
of Echegaray. It might be better than some of these plays, worse than
others; but it stood on the same artistic level. The fact that such a
play could not only be produced, but could brilliantly succeed, on the
London stage gave a potent stimulus to progress. It encouraged ambition
in authors, enterprise in managers. What _Hernani_ was to the romantic
movement of the 'thirties, and _La Dame aux camelias_ to the realistic
movement of the 'fifties, _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_ was to the movement
of the 'nineties towards the serious stage-portraiture of English social
life. All the forces which we have been tracing--Robertsonian realism of
externals, the leisure for thought and experiment involved in vastly
improved financial conditions, the substitution in France of a simpler,
subtler technique for the outworn artifices of the Scribe school, and
the electric thrill communicated to the whole theatrical life of Europe
by contact with the genius of Ibsen--all these slowly converging forces
coalesced to produce, in _The Second Mrs Tanqueray_, an epoch-marking
play.
Pinero followed up _Mrs Tanqueray_ with a remarkable series of
plays--_The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith_, _The Benefit of the Doubt_, _The
Princess and the Butterfly_, _Trelawny of the "Wells_," _The Gay Lord
Quex_, _Iris_, _Letty_, _His House in Order_ and _The Thunderbolt_--all
of which show marked originality of conception and intellectual force.
In January 1893 Charles Wyndham initiated a new policy at the Criterion
theatre, and produced an original play, _The Bauble-Shop_, by Henry
Arthur Jones. It belonged very distinctly to the pre-Tanqueray order of
things; but the same author's _The Case of Rebellious Susan_, in the
following year, showed an almost startlingly sudden access of talent,
which was well maintained in such later works as _Michael and his Lost
Angel_ (1896), that admirable comedy _The Liars_ (1897), and _Mrs Dane's
Defence_ (1900). Sydney Grundy produced after 1893 by far his most
important original works, _The Greatest of These_ (1896) and _The Debt
of Honour_ (1900). R. C. Carton, breaking away from the somewhat
laboured sentimentalism of his earlier manner, produced several light
comedies of thoroughly original humour and of excellent literary
workmanship--_Lord and Lady Algy_, _Wheels within Wheels_, _Lady
Huntworth's Experiment_, _Mr Hopkinson_ and _Mr Preedy and the
Countess_. Haddon Chambers, in _The Tyranny of Tears_ (1899) and _The
Awakening_ (1901), produced two plays of a merit scarcely foreshadowed
in his earlier efforts.
What was of more importance, a new generation of playwrights came to the
front. Its most notable representatives were J. M. Barrie, who displayed
his inexhaustible gift of humorous observation and invention in _Quality
Street_ (1902), _The Admirable Crichton_ (1903), _Little Mary_ (1903),
_Peter Pan_ (1904), _Alice Sit-by-the-Fire_ (1905) and _What Every Woman
Knows_ (1908); Mrs Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes"), who produced in _The
Ambassador_ (1898) a comedy of fine accomplishment; and H. V. Esmond,
Alfred Sutro, Hubert Henry Davies, W. S. Maugham, Rudolf Besier, Roy
Horniman and J. B. Fagan.
Meanwhile, the efforts to relieve the drama from the pressure of the
long-run system had not been confined to the Independent theatre.
Several other enterprises of a like nature had proved more or less
short-lived; but the Stage Society, founded in 1900, was conducted with
more energy and perseverance, and became a real force in the dramatic
world. After two seasons devoted mainly to Bernard Shaw, Ibsen,
Maeterlinck and Hauptmann, it produced in its third season _The Marrying
of Ann Leete_, by Granville Barker (b. 1877), who had developed in its
service his remarkable gifts as a producer of plays. A year or two
later, Barker staged for another organization, the New Century theatre,
Professor Gilbert Murray's rendering of the _Hippolytus_ of Euripides;
and it was partly the success of this production that suggested the
Vedrenne-Barker partnership at the Court theatre, which, between 1904
and 1907, gave an extraordinary impulse to the intellectual life of the
theatre. Adopting the "short-run" system, as a compromise between the
long-run and the repertory systems, the Vedrenne-Barker management made
the plays of Bernard Shaw (both old and new) for the first time really
popular. Of the plays already published _You Never Can Tell_ and _Man
and Superman_ were the most successful; of the new plays, _John Bull's
Other Island_, _Major Barbara_ and _The Doctor's Dilemma_. But though
Shaw was the mainstay of the enterprise, it gave opportunities to
several other writers, the most notable being John Galsworthy (b. 1867),
author of _The Silver Box_ and _Strife_, St John Hankin (1869-1909),
author of _The Return of the Prodigal_ and _The Charity that began at
Home_, and Granville Barker himself, whose plays _The Voysey
Inheritance_ and _Waste_ (1907) were among the most important products
of this movement. It should also be noted that the production of the
_Hippolytus_ was followed up by the production of the _Trojan Women_,
the _Electra_ and the _Medea_ of Euripides, all translated by Gilbert
Murray.
The impulse to which were due the Independent theatre, the Stage Society
and the Vedrenne-Barker management, combined with local influences to
bring about the foundation in Dublin of the Irish National theatre. Its
moving spirit was the poet W. B. Yeats (b. 1865), who wrote for it
_Cathleen-ni-Hoolihan_, _The Hour-Glass_, _The King's Threshold_ and one
or two other plays. Lady Gregory, Padraic Collum, Boyle and other
authors also contributed to the repertory of this admirable little
theatre; but its most notable products were the plays of J. M. Synge
(1871-1909), whose _Riders to the Sea_, _Well of the Saints_ and
_Playboy of the Western World_ showed a fine and original dramatic
faculty combined with extraordinary beauty of style.
Both in Manchester and in Glasgow endeavours have been made, with
considerable success, to counteract the evils of the touring system, by
the establishment of resident companies acting the better class of
modern plays on a "short-run" plan, similar to that of the
Vedrenne-Barker management. The Manchester enterprise was to some extent
subsidized by Miss E. Horniman, and may therefore claim to be the first
endowed theatre in England. The need for endowment on a much larger
scale was, however, strongly advocated in the early years of the 20th
century by the more progressive supporters of English drama, and in 1908
found a place in the scheme for a Shakespeare National theatre, which
was then superimposed on the earlier proposal for a memorial
commemorating the Shakespeare tercentenary, organized by an influential
committee under the chairmanship of the Lord Mayor of London. The scheme
involved the raising of L500,000, half to be devoted to the requisite
site and building, while the remainder would be invested so as to
furnish an annual subvention.
It remains to say a few words of the English literary drama, as opposed
to the acted drama. The two classes are not nearly so distinct as they
once were; but plays continue to be produced from time to time which are
wholly unfitted for the theatre, and others which, though they may be
experimentally placed on the stage, make their appeal rather to the
reading public. Tennyson had essayed in his old age an art which is
scarcely to be mastered after the energy of youth has passed. He
continued to the last to occupy himself more or less with drama, and all
his plays, except _Harold_, found their way to the stage. _The Cup_ and
_Becket_, as we have seen, met with a certain success, but _The Promise
of May_ (1882), an essay in contemporary drama, was a disastrous
failure, while _The Falcon_ (1879) and _The Foresters_ (acted by an
American company in 1893) made little impression. Lord Tennyson was
certainly not lacking in dramatic faculty, but he worked in an outworn
form which he had no longer the strength to renovate. Swinburne
continued now and then to cast his creations in the dramatic mould, but
it cannot be said that his dramas attained either the vitality or the
popularity of his lyrical poems. _Mary Stuart_ (1881) brought his Marian
trilogy to a close. In _Locrine_ he produced a tragedy in heroic
couplets--a thing probably unattempted since the age of Dryden. _The
Sisters_ is a tragedy of modern date with a medieval drama inserted by
way of interlude. _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_ (1899), perhaps
approached more nearly than any of his former works to the concentration
essential to drama. It may be doubted, however, whether his copious and
ebullient style could ever really subject itself to the trammels of
dramatic form. Of other dramas on the Elizabethan model, the most
notable, perhaps, were the works of two ladies who adopt the pseudonym
of "Michael Field"; _Callirrhoe_ (1884), _Brutus Ultor_ (1887), and many
other dramas, show considerable power of imagination and expression, but
are burdened by a deliberate artificiality both of technique and style.
Alfred Austin put forth several volumes in dramatic form, such as
_Savonarola_ (1881), _Prince Lucifer_ (1887), _England's Darling_
(1896), _Flodden Field_ (1905). They are laudable in intention and
fluent in utterance. Notable additions to the purely literary drama were
made by Robert Bridges in his _Prometheus_ (1883), _Nero_ (1885), _The
Feast of Bacchus_ (1889), and other solid plays in verse, full of
science and skill, but less charming than his lyrical poems. Sir Lewis
Morris made a dramatic experiment in _Gycia_, but was not encouraged to
repeat it.
From the outset of his career, John Davidson (1857-1909) was haunted by
the conviction that he was a born dramatist; but his earlier plays, such
as _Smith: a Tragedy_ (1886), _Bruce: a Chronicle Play_ (1884) and
_Scaramouch in Naxos_ (1888), contained more poetry than drama; and his
later pieces, such as _Self's the Man_ (1901), _The Theatrocrat_ (1905)
and the _Triumph of Mammon_ (1907), showed a species of turbulent
imagination, but became more and more fantastic and impracticable.
Stephen Phillips (b. 1867), on the other hand, having had some
experience as an actor, wrote always with the stage in view. In his
first play, _Paolo and Francesca_ (1899; produced in 1902), he succeeded
in combining great beauty of diction with intense dramatic power and
vitality. The same may be said of _Herod_ (1900); but in _Ulysses_
(1902) and _Nero_ (1906) a great falling-off in constructive power was
only partially redeemed by the fine inspiration of individual passages.
The collaboration of Robert Louis Stevenson with William Ernest Henley
produced a short series of interesting experiments in drama, two of
which, _Beau Austin_ (1883) and _Admiral Guinea_ (1884), had more than a
merely experimental value. The former was an emotional comedy, treating
with rare distinction of touch a difficult, almost an impossible,
subject; the latter was a nautical melodrama, raised by force of
imagination and diction into the region of literature. Incomparably the
most important of recent additions to the literary drama is Thomas
Hardy's vast panorama of the Napoleonic wars, entitled _The Dynasts_
(1904-1908). It is rather an epic in dialogue than a play; but however
we may classify it we cannot but recognize its extraordinary
intellectual and imaginative powers.
_United States._--American dramatists have shown on their own account a
progressive tendency, quite as marked as that which we have been tracing
in England. Down to about 1890 the influence of France had been even
more predominant in America than in England. The only American dramatist
of eminence, Bronson Howard (1842-1908), was a disciple, though a very
able one, of the French school. A certain stirring of native
originality manifested itself during the 'eighties, when a series of
semi-improvised farces, associated with the names of two actor-managers,
Harrigan and Hart, depicted low life in New York with real observation,
though in a crude and formless manner. About the same time a native
style of popular melodrama began to make its appearance--a play of
conventional and negligible plot, which attracted by reason of one or
more faithfully observed character-types, generally taken from country
life. _The Old Homestead_, written by Denman Thompson, who himself acted
in it, was the most popular play of this class. Rude as it was, it
distinctly foreshadowed that faithfulness to the external aspects, at
any rate, of everyday life, in which lies the strength of the native
American drama. It was at a sort of free theatre in Boston that James A.
Herne (1840-1901) produced in 1891 his realistic drama of modern life,
_Margaret Fleming_, which did a great deal to awaken the interest of
literary America in the theatrical movement. Herne, an actor and a most
accomplished stage-manager, next produced a drama of rural life in New
England, _Shore Acres_ (1892), which made an immense popular success. It
was a play of the _Old Homestead_ type, but very much more coherent and
artistic. His next play, _Griffith Davenport_ (1898), founded on a
novel, was a drama of life in Virginia during the Civil War, admirable
in its strength and quiet sincerity; while in his last work, _Sag
Harbour_ (1900), Herne returned to the study of rustic character, this
time in Long Island. Herne showed human nature in its more obvious and
straightforward aspects, making no attempt at psychological subtlety;
but within his own limits he was an admirable craftsman. The same
preoccupation with local colour is manifest in the plays of Augustus M.
Thomas, a writer of genuine humour and originality. His localism
announces itself in the very titles of his most popular
plays--_Alabama_, _In Mizzoura_, _Arizona_. He also made a striking
success in _The Witching Hour_, a play dealing with the phenomena of
hypnotism and suggestion. Clyde Fitch (1865-1909), an immensely prolific
playwright of indubitable ability, after becoming known by some
experiments in quasi-historic drama (notably _Nathan Hale_, 1898;
_Barbara Frietchie_, 1899), devoted himself mainly to social drama on
the French model, in which his most notable efforts have been _The
Climbers_ (1900), _The Truth_ (1906), and _The Girl with the Green Eyes_
(1902). In popular drama, with elaborate scenic illustration, William
Gillette (b. 1856), David Belasco (b. 1859) and Charles Klein (b. 1867)
have done notable work. William Vaughn Moody (b. 1869) produced in _The
Great Divide_ (1907) a play of somewhat higher artistic pretensions;
Eugene Walter in _Paid in Full_ (1908) and _The Easiest Way_ (1909)
dealt vigorously with characteristic themes of modern life; and Edward
Sheldon produced in _Salvation Nell_ a slum drama of very striking
realism. The poetic side of drama was mainly represented by Percy
Mackaye (b. 1875), whose _Jeanne d'Arc_ (1906) and _Sappho and Phaon_
showed a high ambition and no small literary power. On the whole it may
be said that, though the financial conditions of the American stage are
even more unfortunate than those which prevail in England, they have
failed to check a very strong movement towards nationalism in drama.
Season by season, America writes more of her own plays, good or bad, and
becomes less dependent on imported work, whether French or English. (W.
A.)
(g) _German Drama._
The history of the German drama differs widely from that of the English,
though a close contact is observable between them at an early point, and
again at relatively recent points, in their annals. The dramatic
literature of Germany, though in its beginnings intimately connected
with the great national movement of the Reformation, soon devoted its
efforts to a sterile imitation of foreign models; while the popular
stage, persistently suiting itself to a robust but gross taste, likewise
largely due to the influence of foreign examples, seemed destined to a
hopeless decay. The literary and the acted drama were thus estranged
from one another during a period of extraordinary length; nor was it
till the middle of the 18th century that, with the opening of a more
hopeful era for the life and literature of the nation, the reunion of
dramatic literature and the stage began to accomplish itself. Before the
end of the same century the progress of the German drama in its turn
began to influence that of other nations, and by the widely
comprehensive character of its literature, as well as by the activity of
its stage, to invite a steadily increasing interest.
The Latin drama in Germany.
The Jesuit drama.
It should be premised that in its beginnings the modern German drama
might have seemed likely to be influenced even more largely than the
English or the French by the copious imitation of classical models which
marked the periods of the Renaissance and the Reformation; but here the
impulse of originality was wanting to bring about a speedy and gradually
a complete emancipation, and imitative reproduction continued in an all
but endless series. The first German (and indeed the earliest
transalpine) writer to follow in the footsteps of the modern Latin drama
of the Italians was the famous Strassburg humanist Jacob Wimpheling
(1450-1528), whose comedy of _Stylpho_ (1480), an attack upon the
ignorance of the pluralist beneficed clergy, marks a kind of epoch in
the history of German dramatic effort. It was succeeded by many other
Latin plays of various kinds, among which may be mentioned J.
Kerckmeister's _Codrus_ (1485), satirizing pedantic schoolmasters; a
series of historical dramas in a moralizing vein, partly on the Turkish
peril, as well as of comedies, by Jacob Locher (1471-1528); two plays by
the great Johann Reuchlin, of which the so-called _Henno_ went through
more than thirty editions; and the _Ludus Dianae_, with another play
likewise in honour of the emperor Maximilian I., by the celebrated
Viennese scholar Conrad Celtes (1459-1508). Sebastian Brant's _Hercules
in Bivio_ (1512) is lost; but Wilibald Pirckheimer's _Eckius dedolatus_
(1520) survives as a dramatic contribution to Luther's controversy with
one of his most active opponents. The _Acolastus_ (1525) of W. Gnaphaeus
(_alias_ Fullonius, his native name was de Volder) should also be
mentioned in the present connexion, as, though a Dutchman by birth, he
spent most of his literary life in Germany. This Terentian version of
the parable of the Prodigal Son was printed in an almost endless number
of editions, as well as in various versions in modern tongues, among
which reference has already been made to the English, for the use of
schools, by J. Palsgrave (1540). Macropedius (Langhveldt) belongs wholly
to the Low Countries. In Germany the stream of these compositions
continued to flow almost without abatement throughout the earlier half
of the 16th century; but in the days of the Reformation it takes a turn
to scriptural subjects, and during the latter part of the century
remains on the whole faithful to this preference.[273] These Latin plays
may be called school-dramas in the most precise sense; for they were
both performed in the schools and read in class with commentaries
specially composed for them; nor was it except very reluctantly that in
this age the vernacular drama was allowed to intrude into scholastic
circles. It should be noticed that the Jesuit order, which afterwards
proved so keenly alive to the influence which dramatic performances
exercise over the youthful mind, only very gradually abandoned the
principle, formally sanctioned in their _Ratio studiorum_, that the
acting of plays (these being always in the Latin tongue) should only
rarely be permitted in their seminaries. The flourishing period of the
Jesuit drama begins with the spread of the order in the west and
south-west of the Empire in the last decade of the 16th century, and
then continues, through the vicissitudes of good and evil, with a
curious intermixture of Latin and German plays, during the whole of the
17th and the better part of the 18th. These productions, which ranged in
their subjects from biblical and classical story to themes of
contemporary history (such as the relief of Vienna by Sobiesky and the
peace of Ryswick), seem generally to bear the mark of their
authorship--that of teachers appointed by their superiors to execute
this among other tasks allotted to them; but, as it seems unnecessary to
return to this special growth, it may be added that the extraordinary
productiveness of the Jesuit dramatists, and the steadiness of
self-repetition which is equally characteristic of them, should warn us
against underrating its influence upon a considerable proportion of the
nation's educational life during a long succession of generations.
Beginnings of the vernacular German drama.
Hans Sachs.
The English comedians.
Separation between the stage and literature.
While the scholars of the German Renaissance, who became so largely the
agents of the Reformation, eagerly dramatized scriptural subjects in the
Latin, and sometimes (as in the case of Luther's protege P. Rebhun[274])
in the native tongue, the same influence made itself felt in another
sphere of dramatic activity. Towards the close of the middle ages, as
has been seen, dramatic performances had in Germany, as in England,
largely fallen into the hands of the civic gilds, and the composition of
plays was more especially cultivated by the master-singers of Nuremberg
and other towns. It was thus that, under the influence of the
Reformation, and of the impulse given by Luther and others to the use of
High German as the popular literary tongue, Hans Sachs, the immortal
shoemaker of Nuremberg, seemed destined to become the father of the
popular German drama. In his plays, "spiritual," "secular," and
_Fastnachtsspiele_ alike, the interest indeed lies in the dialogue
rather than in the action, nor do they display any attempt at
development of character. In their subjects, whether derived from
Scripture or from popular legend and fiction,[275] there is no novelty,
and in their treatment no originality. But the healthy vigour and fresh
humour of this marvellously fertile author, and his innate sympathy with
the views and sentiments of the burgher class to which he belonged, were
elements of genuine promise--a promise which the event was signally to
disappoint. Though the manner of Hans Sachs found a few followers, and
is recognizable in the German popular drama even of the beginning of the
17th century, the literature of the Reformation, of which his works may
claim to form part, was soon absorbed in labours of a very different
kind. The stage, after admitting novelties introduced from Italy or
(under Jesuit supervision) from Spain, was subjected to another and
enduring influence. Among the foreign actors of various nations who
flitted through the innumerable courts of the empire, or found a
temporary home there, special prominence was acquired, towards the close
of the 16th and in the early years of the 17th century, by the "English
comedians," who appeared at Cassel, Wolfenbuttel, Berlin, Dresden,
Cologne, &c. Through these players a number of early English dramas
found their way into Germany, where they were performed in more or less
imperfect versions, and called forth imitations by native authors. Duke
Henry Julius of Brunswick-Luneburg[276] (1564-1613) and Jacob Ayrer (a
citizen of Nuremberg, where he died, 1605) represent the endeavours of
the early German drama to suit its still uncouth forms to themes
suggested by English examples; and in their works, and in those of
contemporary playwrights, there reappears no small part of what we may
conclude to have been the "English comedians'" _repertoire_.[277] (The
converse influence of German themes brought home with them by the
English actors, or set in motion by their strolling ubiquity, cannot
have been equal in extent, though Shakespeare himself may have derived
the idea of one of his plots[278] from such a source). But, though
welcome to both princes and people, the exertions of these foreign
comedians, and of the native imitators who soon arose in the earliest
professional companies of actors known in Germany, instead of bringing
about a union between the stage and literature, led to a directly
opposite result. The popularity of these strollers was owing partly to
the (very real) blood and other horrors with which their plays were
deluged, partly to the buffoonery with which they seasoned, and the
various tricks and feats with which they diversified, their
performances. The representatives of the English clowns had learnt much
on their way from their brethren in the Netherlands, where in this
period the art of grotesque acting greatly flourished. Nor were the aids
of other arts neglected,--to this day in Germany professors of the
"equestrian drama" are known by the popular appellation of "English
riders." From these true descendants of the mimes, then, the
professional actors in Germany inherited a variety of tricks and
traditions; and soon the favourite figures of the popular comic stage
became conventional, and were stereotyped by the use of masks. Among
these an acknowledged supremacy was acquired by the native _Hans Wurst_
(Jack Pudding)--of whose name Luther disavowed the invention, and who is
known already to Hans Sachs--the privileged buffoon, and for a long
series of generations the real lord and master, of the German stage. If
that stage, with its grossness and ribaldry, seemed likely to become
permanently estranged from the tastes and sympathies of the educated
classes, the fault was by no means entirely its own and that of its
patron the populace. The times were evil times for a national effort of
any kind; and poetic literature was in all its branches passing into the
hands of scholars who were often pedants, and whose language was a
jargon of learned affectations. Thus things continued, till the awful
visitation of the Thirty Years' War cast a general blight upon the
national life, and the traditions of the popular theatre were left to
the guardianship of the marionettes (_Puppenspiele_)!
The literary drama of the 17th century.
When, in the midst of that war, German poets once more began to essay
the dramatic form, the national drama was left outside their range of
vision. M. Opitz, who holds an honoured place in the history of the
German language and literature, in this branch of his labours contented
himself with translations of classical dramas and of Italian
pastorals--among the latter one of Rinuccini's _Daphne_, with which the
history of the opera in Germany begins. A. Gryphius, though as a comic
dramatist lacking neither vigour nor variety, and acquainted with
Shakespearian[279] as well as Latin and Italian examples, chiefly
devoted himself to the imitation of Latin, earlier French, and Dutch
tragedy, the rhetorical dialogue of which he effectively reproduced in
the Alexandrine metre.[280] Neither the turgid dramas of D. C. von
Lohenstein (1665-1684), for whose _Cleopatra_ the honour of having been
the first German tragedy has been claimed, nor even the much healthier
comedies of Chr. Weise (1642-1708) were brought upon the stage; while
the religious plays of J. Klay (1616-1656) are mere recitations
connected with the Italian growth of the _oratorio_. The frigid
allegories commemorative of contemporary events, with which the learned
from time to time supplied the theatre, and the pastoral dramas with
which the idyllic poets of Nuremberg--"the shepherds of the
Pegnitz"--after the close of the war gratified the peaceful longings of
their fellow-citizens, were alike mere scholastic efforts. These indeed
continued in the universities and _gymnasia_ to keep alive the love of
both dramatic composition and dramatic representation, and to encourage
the theatrical taste which led so many students into the professional
companies. But neither these dramatic exercises nor the _ludi Caesarei_
in which the Jesuits at Vienna revived the pomp and pageantry, and the
mixture of classical and Christian symbolism, of the Italian
Renaissance, had any influence upon the progress of the popular drama.
The stage before its reform.
The history of the German stage remains to about the second decennium of
the 18th century one of the most melancholy, as it is in its way one of
the most instructive, chapters of theatrical history. Ignored by the
world of letters, the actors in return deliberately sought to emancipate
their art from all dependence upon literary material. Improvisation
reigned supreme, not only in farce, where _Hans Wurst_, with the aid of
Italian examples, never ceased to charm his public, but in the serious
drama likewise (in which, however, he also played his part) in those
_Haupt- und Staatsactionen_ (high-matter-of-state-dramas), the plots of
which were taken from the old stores of the English comedians, from the
religious drama and its sources, and from the profane history of all
times. The hero of this period is "Magister" J. Velthen (or Veltheim),
who at the head of a company of players for a time entered the service
of the Saxon court, and, by reproducing comedies of Moliere and other
writers, sought to restrain the licence which he had himself carried
beyond all earlier precedent, but who had to fall back into the old ways
and the old life. His career exhibits the climax of the efforts of the
art of acting to stand alone; after his death (c. 1693) chaos ensues.
The strolling companies, which now included actresses, continued to
foster the popular love of the stage, and even under its most degraded
form to uphold its national character against the rivalry of the opera,
and that of the Italian _commedia dell' arte_. From the latter was
borrowed Harlequin, with whom _Hans Wurst_ was blended, and who became a
standing figure in every kind of popular play.[281] He established his
sway more especially at Vienna, where from about 1712 the first
permanent German theatre was maintained. But for the actors in general
there was little permanence, and amidst miseries of all sorts, and under
the growing ban of clerical intolerance, the popular stage seemed
destined to hopeless decay. A certain vitality of growth seems, under
clerical guidance, to have characterized the plays of the people in
Bavaria and parts of Austria.
F. K. Neuber, Gottsched, and the Leipzig school.